Sir Christopher Wren _ Scientist_ scholar and architect Lawrence Weaver 484 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sir Christopher Wren
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Sir Christopher Wren
Scientist, scholar and architect

Author: Lawrence Weaver

Release date: March 23, 2023 [eBook #70352]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Offices of "Country Life",
Ltd., 1923

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70352

Credits: David E. Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR
CHRISTOPHER WREN ***

SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN

COUNTRY
LIFE

THE CHIEF WORKS OF WREN.
A tribute by C. R. Cockerell, R.A.

SIR
CHRISTOPHER WREN

SCIENTIST, SCHOLAR AND
ARCHITECT

BY SIR
LAWRENCE WEAVER
K.B.E., F.S.A., Hon. A.R.I.B.A.

LONDON
PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICES OF “COUNTRY LIFE,” LTD.,
20, TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 2,
AND BY GEORGE NEWNES, LTD., 8-11, SOUTHAMPTON
STREET, STRAND, W.C. 2. NEW YORK: CHARLES
SCRIBNER’S SONS

MCMXXIII

Printed in Great Britain

PREFACE
This little book pretends to be neither a Life of Wren nor a detailed record
of his achievement. His working years were more than seventy. At fifteen
the inventor of a weather-clock and the author of a Theory of Trigonometry
which delighted Sir Charles Scarborough, he died in his ninety-first year,
not indeed in professional harness, but still working at the multitudinous
problems to which his life had been devoted.
When the definitive “Life and Works” comes to be written, it will itself be
someone’s life-work, if it is to be adequate.
I attempt no more than to give impressions of the many sides of a great
Englishman, and have taken the liberty to ignore the chronological order
which is fitting in a biography.
My old friend Henry Wheatley pleased himself with the notion that people
who write get a grossly unfair share of the world’s praise, for the relative
greatness of men is judged by what writers say of them, and writers are
obsessed by the importance of their own craft.
It is also true that architecture has been in England an inarticulate trade, and
one regarded in our generation as a technical mystery with which we are
little concerned.
The greatness of Wren has been obscured by the modesty which checked
any inclination he may have had to enshrine his thought in writing, save in
few and disjointed but admirable fragments on science and architecture: in
any case his prodigious output of building left little time for his pen.
It is because Sir Christopher Wren brought to his superb architectural
accomplishment the equipment of a mathematician, of a master of natural
science, and of a scholar, that it is what it is. He has been called the English
Leonardo. The praise, though great, is not excessive, but the parallel falls
short of completeness. Leonardo was poet and mystic as well as painter,
sculptor, scientist, and philosopher. But if Wren did not carry his head in the
clouds, he was still something more than our architect of greatest
achievement. He was a man of scientific and intellectual stature worthy to

be measured with our best. He was, above all, a great English gentleman.
His contemporaries knew his quality: it were very shame if we ignored it.
The Bicentenary Celebrations have given us opportunity to pay the homage
due.
February 25, 1923.
(Two hundredth anniversary of the
death of Wren.)

AUTHORITIES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Parentalia or Memoirs of the Wrens, by Christopher, the son of Sir
Christopher, is the main source of information about the great architect. It is
as ill-constructed a book as one may meet, yet it possesses a charm of its
own. Christopher’s idea of a biography seems to have been to print notes,
letters, and discourses as they came to his hand, without any thread of text
to give coherence to very diverse material. The result is a rather forbidding
publication, which demands of the reader no little resolution. The
Parentalia deals not only with Sir Christopher, but with his father, Dean
Christopher, and his uncle, Bishop Matthew. The father, as Registrar of the
Order of the Garter and Dean of Windsor, and the uncle, as Bishop of Ely,
filled no small parts in the Church history of their day; but we are little
concerned with them here, except as they came into Sir Christopher’s life.
This ill-compiled miscellany when completed by the younger Christopher,
who died in 1747, was published by his son Stephen in 1750. It served as a
mine for the Lives by Elmes, Miss Phillimore, and Miss Milman, and has
necessarily been consulted freely by all who have made Wren the subject of
their pens. In 1903 that part of the Parentalia which referred to Sir
Christopher was reprinted by Mr. C. R. Ashbee at the Essex House Press,
and twenty fine drawings of Wren’s churches by E. H. New were
reproduced. It is finely printed, and Mr. Ernest J. Enthoven’s editing
ensured an accurate transcript of the original edition as published by
Stephen Wren. To the kindness of Mr. New and Mr. Enthoven I owe the
permission to reproduce here some of the former’s drawings. Stephen Wren
was unmarried, but contrived to beget a daughter, Margaret, who took the
name of Wren. For her a copy of the Parentalia was bound sumptuously in
red leather, tooled and gilt. It bears the initials “M. W.” and Margaret’s
autograph appears on the title-page. Interleaved in this delightful and
unique volume are many manuscripts, autograph letters, and engravings.
Some are in connection with the Dean and the Bishop, but most have to do
with Sir Christopher. About 1908 I became acquainted with Mrs. Pigott, née
Catherine Wren-Hoskyns, the last surviving direct descendant of Sir
Christopher. She was then old and in ill-health, and contemplated

bequeathing the heirloom copy to a distant collateral. I persuaded her to
allow me to collect a suitable sum of money which she might bequeath
instead, and the story of that piece of mendicancy, with a list of the people
who generously backed me, is deposited with the heirloom copy in the
Library of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Amongst the manuscripts of the heirloom Parentalia is a chronological
Series Vitæ et Actorum Domini Christophori Wren in four pages. This is a
copy, perhaps even may be the draft, of the list in the Lansdowne
Manuscript at the British Museum, which was initialed by Sir Christopher
himself about a year before he died.
I am bound to say, however, that even a list so apparently authentic gives
me no confidence. Wren was the last man to be interested in materials for
his own biography, and he was ninety when he checked the list. His son was
incurably casual and inaccurate, and the Elmes, Phillimore, and Milman
Lives were based on it blindly, except in the case of Miss Milman, who used
her own judgment somewhat. Elmes was laborious, and had access to a lot
of material such as State Papers, some of which mysteriously got into his
own possession; but he was almost blind, and he dated his dedication to Sir
Humphry Davy exactly a hundred years before I date this, at a period when
biography was no exact science. The time has come for someone to go back
to all the originals, including many which have come to light since his day.
I hope this work will not linger until February 25, 2023.
For light on Wren as a scientist I make very grateful acknowledgments to
my friend Sir Daniel Hall, K.C.B., F.R.S., an expert in the outlook of the
philosophers of Wren’s day. He will recognise as his own a shamelessly
large number of sentences in Chapter IV. Professor Hinks, F.R.S., the
present Gresham Professor of Astronomy, has helped me with notes on that
aspect of his great predecessor’s activities. Mr. Wells, the reigning Warden
of Wadham, has kindly checked my chapter on Wren’s Oxford days. There
is a common phrase for men of encyclopædic knowledge, that they have
forgotten more than other men ever knew. It would be true of my old friend,
Mr. Arthur Bolton, Curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum, but—he has not
forgotten. He has been so helpful and full of suggestions that it would be
more honest if his name were with mine on the title-page. But he shares
Wren’s gift of modesty as well as learning, and I need only express an
admiring gratitude. I am indebted to the Duke of Portland, to the Warden of

Wadham, and to the Editor of Architecture for permission to reproduce
portraits.
I have attempted no bibliography, in which Longman’s Three Cathedrals
would have a prominent place. That task and a schedule of Wren’s
drawings, with reproductions of those that can be definitely attributed to
him, will be amongst the fitting works of the projected Wren Society.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE v
AUTHORITIES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
I. PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 1
II. OXFORD CAREER AND EARLY INVENTIONS 9
III. FAMILY LIFE 18
ASTRONOMER, MATHEMATICIAN, AND
IV. NATURAL SCIENTIST 28
BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE AND VISIT
V. TO PARIS 43
VI. TOWN-PLANNING 53
VII. ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL 59
VIII. THE CITY CHURCHES 78
CHELSEA, HAMPTON COURT, AND
IX. GREENWICH 97
X. OTHER BUILDINGS: PUBLIC AND DOMESTIC 104
WREN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES: LAST
XI. YEARS 112
XII. THE PROFESSIONAL MAN 123
XIII. STUDENT AND SCHOLAR 132
XIV. “THE ARCHITECT OF ADVENTURE” 144
APPENDIX I.: A NOTE IN AMPLIFICATION OF THE
REFERENCE
IN CHAPTER IV. TO PASCAL’S PROBLEM 158
APPENDIX II.: AN ATTEMPT AT A WREN CHRONOLOGY 160
APPENDIX III.: A NOTE ON SOME PORTRAITS OF WREN 164
INDEX 167

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES
PLATE
I. THE CHIEF WORKS OF WREN Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
II. WREN AS A MAN OF FORTY 50
III. WREN’S PLAN OF LONDON 54
IV. THE WELBECK PORTRAIT 60
BUST BY EDWARD PEARCE AT THE
V. ASHMOLEAN 70
VI. THE WEST FRONT OF ST. PAUL’S 72
VII. ST. PAUL’S UNDER THE DOME 74
VIII. ST. STEPHEN’S WALBROOK 88
IX. CHELSEA HOSPITAL: THE MAIN PORTICO 98
X. HAMPTON COURT: WREN’S TWO FRONTS 100
GREENWICH HOSPITAL AND ITS TWO
XI. DOMES 102
TRINITY COLLEGE LIBRARY,
XII. CAMBRIDGE: RIVER FRONT 108
XIII. THE WADHAM PORTRAIT OF WREN 114
XIV. THE ST. PAUL’S DEANERY PORTRAIT 120
THE CENTRAL PORTION OF THE
XV. CHIAROSCURO ENGRAVING 126
XVI. WREN MEDAL AT WADHAM COLLEGE 148
IN THE TEXT
PAGE
ST. PETER’S xv, xvi
ST. AUGUSTIN’S 55
ST. MARTIN’S AND ST. PAUL’S 56

THE SECOND DESIGN FOR ST. PAUL’S 64
PLAN OF THE “REJECTED DESIGN” 66
WEST ELEVATION OF THE “WARRANT DESIGN” 68
PLAN OF ST. PAUL’S AS BUILT 72
ST. VEDAST 79
ST. ALBAN 80
ST. DUNSTAN’S 82
ST. MAGNUS 85
ST. MARGARET’S PATTENS 86
ST. BRIDE’S 87
ST. MILDRED, BREAD STREET 91
ST. BRIDE’S 92
ST. MARY-LE-BOW 146

ST PETER’S

ST PETER’S

SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN
SCIENTIST, SCHOLAR, AND
ARCHITECT

CHAPTER I
PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD
On the 20th October, 1632, Christopher Wren was born in the Rectory at
East Knoyle in Wiltshire. His father, also Dr. Christopher Wren, is said to
have descended from an ancient English family of Danish origin which
settled in the county of Durham; but I can find no authority for the Danish
story except Parentalia.
In J. W. Rylands’ Records of Wroxall Abbey there is a pedigree which shows
Sir Christopher’s grandfather, Francis Wren, Citizen and Mercer of London,
who lived from 1552 to 1624. His father was Cuthbert and his grandfather
William Wren, of Sherborn House, Durham, who died in 1539. This
William is described as brother to a Christopher Wren, of Wythebroke,
Warwick, who died in 1542, but the authority is doubtful. If it is accurate,
however, it may be an added reason for Sir Christopher’s purchase of the
Warwickshire estate of Wroxall for his son, who settled down there as a
country gentleman.
Sir Christopher’s mother was Mary, daughter and heiress of Robert Cox, of
Fonthill, Wiltshire. So on both sides Christopher was well born. He was an
only son, with seven sisters, but one of them only is important in Wren’s
story. She married, in 1640, Dr. William Holder, of Blechington, Oxford.
We know nothing of Christopher’s mother except her name, but his father
cut some figure in Charles I.’s reign. A loyalist of loyalists, he succeeded
his more distinguished brother, Bishop Matthew Wren, in 1635, as Dean of
Windsor and Registrar of the Order of the Garter. When St. George’s
Chapel was plundered by the Cromwellian troops, the spoils included the
three Registers of the Garter Knights, but by making a heavy payment the
Dean got them back again, and cherished them until his death in 1658. They
then passed into the safe keeping of Christopher, who soon after the
Restoration handed them over to Dr. Bruno Ryves, then the Registrar of the
Garter.
Dean Christopher was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and St. John’s,
Oxford, and his son’s scientific attainments were inherited. He was a man

of delightful character, and evidently there was between father and son the
closest affection, which shines even through the formal phrases used in
those days by children when writing to their fathers. That he added skill in
architecture to his wide literary and mathematical knowledge is clear from
the fact that he was employed in 1634 to design a building at Windsor for
Charles I.’s Queen, and a detailed estimate prepared by the Dean has
survived. As the building was to cost over £13,000, it must have been an
ambitious undertaking, but it never took shape owing to the disturbances of
the time.
It was of great importance to Wren that his early training should have been
given to him by so able a father, especially as he was, in childhood,
exceedingly delicate. The Rev. William Shepheard helped the Dean as
domestic tutor, and the boy’s mathematics were looked after by Dr. William
Holder. Aubrey, in his Lives of Eminent Men, says of Holder that “he was
very helpful in the education of his brother-in-law, a youth of prodigious
inventive wit, to whom he was as tender as if he had been his own child. He
gave him his instructions in geometry and arithmetic, and when he was a
young scholar at the University of Oxford was a very necessary and kind
friend.”
Amongst the manuscripts in the heirloom Parentalia is a letter in Latin,
dated “E Musæo meo, Calendis Januarii, 1641,” from Wren to his father,
beautifully written, and expressing filial gratitude in a high degree, and
below is a Latin verse with its English translation. At the foot the delighted
father has written, “Scripto hoc, Ao ætatis suæ Decimo ab octobris 20o
elapso.” It was certainly a remarkable accomplishment for a boy of nine.
Also amongst the Parentalia MSS. is a versified paraphrase of the first to
the fourteenth verses of the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel. The
penmanship of this is also admirable, and Wren maintained this merit of
legibility until the end of his life.
Wren went in due course to Westminster, and worked under the redoubtable
Dr. Busby. His father’s choice of the school was doubtless due to the
vehemently loyalist attitude of the great headmaster, but it may also have
been influenced by the fact that Busby, though a notable classic, did not
frown upon mathematical and scientific studies. Christopher was a Town
Boy, and never entered the College proper. Possibly it was at Westminster

that Wren first met Robert Hooke, with whom he was to be so closely
associated in after life, though this guess is a little doubtful, for Hooke was
older by three years; but he was also a Town Boy, and boarded in Busby’s
house, going but little into school. John Sargeaunt thought that Hooke
studied mathematics apart, and that this liberty was probably shared by
young Christopher. It is likely that owing to Christopher’s delicate health he
left Westminster early and pursued his studies under the eye of Sir Charles
Scarborough, a young but famous physician who had developed a marked
genius for mathematics and science. If Wren had remained at Westminster,
he would almost certainly have proceeded in the ordinary course, like most
Westminster boys, either to Christ Church, Oxford, or Trinity College,
Cambridge: the choice of Wadham was no doubt dictated by his friendship
with the Warden. Evidently, however, Wren retained an affection for his old
school, because he took much trouble over the design of a new dormitory
which led to a great deal of wrangling, and the work of building was
postponed again and again. When, ultimately, the policy of rebuilding was
settled in 1721, Wren was ninety, and no longer in practice. His design,
therefore, was put aside, and the Earl of Burlington produced what
purported to be a new one, but was, in fact, Wren’s, with some slight
modifications. The existing building, in fact, which looks out on the quiet
Abbey Garden, may be regarded as a work of Wren, though technically the
amateur Burlington was responsible for it.
If we are to believe Elmes, it was not until 1647, when Christopher was in
his fifteenth year, that he became acquainted with Sir Charles Scarborough,
but it seems more reasonable to ascribe to the Scarborough period,
following Wren’s retirement from Westminster, a manuscript letter in Latin
verse to his father, dated September 13, 1645, dedicating to him an
instrument called Suum Panorganum Astronomicum, and a tract De Ortu
Fluminum. On that assumption Christopher left Westminster before he had
completed his thirteenth year.
There is very little to show that Wren was much interested in the graphic
arts, but on the sheet in the heirloom Parentalia which contains the Latin
letter is an ink sketch of a woman holding up a dial-shaped object, which is
possibly the Panorganum.
Possibly, however, this may be the sketch for a design on the ceiling of a
room which he did when he was sixteen. It included “two figures,

representing Astronomy and Geometry and their Attributes, artfully drawn
with his pen.” I cannot affirm that the lady in the heirloom copy is a piece
of his “artful” drawing, but it is likely.
What seems to fix the start of Wren’s studies with Scarborough as roughly
contemporary with his Panorganum letter is the fact that the boy in 1647
was engaged in translating into Latin, at Sir Charles’ request, Oughtred’s
Clavis Mathematicæ. In the same year he had a patent granted him for a
diplographic instrument for writing with two pens. Christopher describes
his invention at length. An instrument of the kind must have then seemed
very important, because Sir William Petty patented a similar contrivance in
the same year. About three years later someone stole Wren’s invention. He
was exceedingly annoyed, and wrote a letter in which he refers to the fact
that Oliver Cromwell’s attention had been directed to it. Without claiming
anything great for the invention itself, he wanted to clear himself from the
aspersion of having annexed somebody else’s device. In later years there
were to be many examples of people picking up an idea of Wren’s,
developing it to their own great credit, and failing to acknowledge the man
without whose idea they never would have started on their enterprise.
Whenever it was that Wren began working under Sir Charles Scarborough,
it was not until his fifteenth year that he informed his father that he was
acting as a demonstrating assistant to the physician who lectured on
anatomy at Surgeons’ Hall. The story of his activities is set out in a
dignified Latin letter, which refers not only to the Scarborough activities,
but to Wren’s invention of a weather-clock, of an instrument to write with in
the dark, and of a treatise on spherical trigonometry. Very impressive also is
a long metrical Latin essay on the Reformation of the Zodiac, which runs to
nearly fifteen quarto pages, in an appendix to Elmes’ Life. He was sixteen
when he wrote (again in Latin) to Mr. Oughtred, whose important essay on
geometry he had translated into Latin. We may agree with Elmes that “these
juvenile essays prove the fecundity, the ripeness, and the highly cultivated
state of his mind, his zeal, and his ardent enthusiasm in the pursuit of
knowledge and literary honours.”
But the weather-clock was destined to develop from the stage of a “juvenile
essay.” When he wrote to his father in 1647 that he was enjoying
Scarborough’s society, he added that he had imparted to him “one of these

inventions of mine, a weather-clock—namely, with revolving cylinder, by
means of which a record can be kept through the night.”
Of this Scarborough thought well enough to ask the lad to have one
constructed in brass at his expense. I find in Birch’s History of the Royal
Society, vol. i., under date December 9, 1663: “Dr. Wren’s description of his
weather-clock consisting of two wings that may be added to a pendulum
clock was read.” The engraving published by Birch shows a far simpler
arrangement than that of the drawing among the heirloom MSS. The printed
Parentalia gives a description of a device more complicated than Birch’s
description of Wren’s communication of 1663, and refers to a circular
thermometer designed to correct the error caused by the weight of liquid.
This does not appear in the drawing; the thermometer is of the ordinary air
type. The printed Parentalia refers to Robert Hooke’s improvements on
Wren’s design, but they only partly appear in the drawing, which would
seem to show an intermediate development between Wren’s original device
and Hooke’s latest achievements.
The thing itself is of no importance now, but is worth remembering, as
showing not only the early blossoming of Wren’s scientific achievement,
but also his patience and persistence in developing an idea over a period of
years.
All this was a good prelude to his life at Oxford, which began when he was
young to be an undergraduate, by our standards, but older than we have
been led to believe.

CHAPTER II
OXFORD CAREER AND EARLY INVENTIONS
The question as to when Wren started his University career presents
considerable difficulties, but it is worth exploring, because his youth at
Oxford had an enduring effect on the development of the man.
Parentalia is explicit: “In the year 1646 and Fourteenth of his Age, Mr.
Wren was admitted a Gentleman-Commoner at Wadham College ... where
he soon attracted the Friendship and esteem of the two most celebrated
Virtuosi and Mathematicians of their Time, Dr. John Wilkins, Warden of
Wadham, and Dr. Seth Ward....” This date is confirmed by the Lansdowne
Chronology MS., prepared by Wren’s son, and initialed by Sir Christopher
himself two years before his death. The MS. states:
“1646. Admissus in Collegio de Wodham.”
But it is necessary to consider other evidence. R. B. Gardiner, in Registers
of Wadham College, notes that Wren’s caution money as Fellow Commoner
was received on June 25, 1649 or 1650. Sir Thomas G. Jackson gives 1649
as the year when Wren entered the college as Fellow Commoner. Wilkins
did not become Warden, in place of Dr. Pitt, expelled by the Parliamentary
Visitors, until April 13, 1648, when his name was entered in the Buttery
Book. On May 5, 1648, Wilkins had a dispensation for twelve months from
the full performance of his duties in consequence of his attendance on the
Prince Elector, whose Chaplain he was. It was not impossible that Wren
should have gone to Wadham at fourteen—the profligate Rochester
matriculated at twelve and was M.A. before he was fourteen—but it is
unlikely. Wren was exceedingly delicate as a boy, there was no Wilkins at
Wadham to attract him there when he was fourteen or for two years after,
and he was, even in 1649, the first Fellow Commoner entered during
Wilkins’ wardenship. If Wilkins took the year’s leave granted him, and if
June 25, 1649, be taken as the correct date for the payment of Wren’s
caution money, he went there a month after the Warden settled down in his
post.

If Wren had proceeded direct to Oxford at fourteen from being under Busby
at Westminster, he would almost certainly have gone to Christ Church, not
to Wadham. Moreover, it is certain that during his sixteenth year, and
perhaps later, he was very busy with mathematics and science under Sir
Charles Scarborough in London.
It is just conceivable that he entered at Wadham soon after Oxford
surrendered to the Parliament in 1646, and that he did not come into
residence until 1649 or 1650, but no document has ever suggested that, and
the theory can be dismissed. It is the opinion of Mr. Wells, the reigning
Warden, that if Wren only matriculated in 1650 he could not have
proceeded to his B.A. in 1651, as in fact he did. But the year 1649, accepted
by Sir Thomas Jackson, is feasible on the basis of Wren’s notable precocity
and the then readiness of the University not to insist on three years, as is
seen by Rochester’s case.
It is, however, fair to add that the entry of Wren’s £5 in the Wadham book is
undated, but it comes at the foot of a page headed 1650, on which the
preceding entry is dated June 25, and the three previous names are
registered by Gardiner as 1650. It may be, however, that as the Wren entry
is undated, it was added later. On the other hand, if he had gone to Oxford
in 1646 he could scarcely have occupied the then unheard-of time of five
years before taking his B.A., March 18, 1650-51.
I attach no importance to the MS. prepared by Wren’s son Christopher, or,
indeed, to any of his documents, and prefer to rest on the College records.
Miss Phillimore followed the MS., but Miss Milman, without setting down
any evidence, assumed that Wren spent three years in London between Dr.
Busby and Oxford. I think she did wisely, and on all the evidence, obscure
and conflicting as it is, I accept 1649 as the year when Wren began his
Oxford career.
The rest of the dates can be cleared off shortly. He became M.A. December
11, 1653, having been elected a Probationer Fellow of All Souls in
November of the same year, and was made D.C.L. at All Souls on
September 12, 1661.
Wren was fortunate in the influence of the Warden of Wadham, which was
so powerful during the formation of Wren’s character that it is necessary to
form some picture of the man. John Wilkins reigned beneficently over the

college from 1648 to 1659, and was described by Aubrey as “no great-read
man, but one of much and deepe thinking; and a prudent man as well as
ingeniose.” As the late Dr. Wright Henderson, the biographer of Wilkins,
wrote of him, “his greatness fell short of genius, for it was the effect of
ordinary qualities, rarely combined and tempered into one character; but
more effective for useful work in the world than genius without sanity.”
Soon after the Civil War broke out, Wilkins was living in London as the
chaplain of Charles Lewis, Prince Elector Palatine, with whom Christopher
renewed a childish acquaintance. Mr. Wright Henderson thinks that Wilkins
became the leader, as he was certainly the friend, of the group of students of
natural philosophy who afterwards formed the Royal Society. It seems
obvious that Wren was entered at Wadham in order that he might be under
Wilkins. It is certain that he became the Warden’s favourite pupil.
It is evident from the amazing “Catalogue of New Theories, Inventions,
Experiments, and Mechanick Improvements,” exhibited by Mr. Wren at the
“First Assemblies at Wadham College in Oxford for Advancement of
Natural and Experimental Knowledge” which is printed in Parentalia that
Wren took all knowledge for his province. There are fifty-three items,
ranging from such solemnities as the “Hypothesis of the Moon’s Libration,
in Solid” and “To find whether the earth moves” through the uncertainties
of “Probable Ways for making Fresh Water at Sea,” and the largeness of
“Divers Improvements in the Art of Husbandry” down to the pleasant
simplicity of “A Way of Imbroidery for Beds, Hangings, cheap and fair.”
We are reminded of the association between architecture and military
engineering during the height of the Italian Renaissance, by “To build in the
Sea, Forts, Moles, etc.” and “Secure and Speedier Ways of attacking Forts
than by Approaches and Galleries.” Sanmicheli had invented the pentagonal
bastion: Inigo Jones had fortified Basing House against the Parliament’s
attack, and had been one of the defenders. We would give much to learn
something of Wren’s invention for “Ways of Submarine Navigation.” If he
had developed “Easier Ways of Whale-fishing,” it would have given
material for another chapter in Moby Dick. Eheu fugaces! There is a hint of
the coming gramophone in “A speaking Organ, articulating Sounds,” and
“Divers new Musical Instruments” helps to explain Wren’s devotion to his
daughter Jane, whose monument in the crypt of St. Paul’s—she died at the

age of twenty-six—shows her in Francis Bird’s rather heavy-handed
sculpture as seated at an organ.
The technique of writing always interested Wren, so it is natural to find in
the catalogue “To write in the Dark” and “To write Double by an
Instrument,” the latter a dodge he developed to the point of patenting it.
The tools of his future profession already attracted him. “A Scenographical
Instrument, to survey at one Station” is followed by “A Perspective Box, to
survey with it,” and there is a ring of Bacon and Wotton in the compendious
phrase “New Designs tending to Strength, Convenience, and Beauty in
Building.”
There is certainly no more rightly prophetic entry in the whole astonishing
list.
“Several new Ways of graving and etching” gives a certain colour to the
story—though it must be discredited—that Wren introduced mezzotint.
“New Ways of Intelligence, new Cyphers” marks his early attachment to an
amusement which he shared with others of his day, though without the need
to use the art to conceal roguish passages in what he wrote, as was the case
with Pepys’ shorthand.
His later excursions into veterinary surgery and the transfusion of human
blood are heralded by the memorandum “To purge or vomit, or alter the
Mass by Injection into the Blood, by Plaisters, by various dressing a
Fontanell.”
We have a glimpse of the experiments connected with the working out of
“A Pavement harder, fairer, and cheaper than Marble,” as well as into the
social side of these Wadham assemblies, through John Evelyn’s glasses.
On July 13, 1654, he was at Dr. Wilkins’, at Wadham, and saw:
“Variety of shadows, dyals, perspectives, and many other mathematical and
magical curiosities, a way-wiser, a thermometer, a monstrous magnet, conic
and other sections, a ballance on a demi-circle, most of them of his own and
that prodigious young scholar Mr. Chr. Wren, who presented me with a
piece of white marble, which he had stain’d with a lively red, very deepe, as
beautiful as if it had been natural.”

Two days before Evelyn had visited after dinner “that miracle of a youth.”
There is no need to fill out the Wadham catalogue of inventions: we can
accept Evelyn’s valuation, and he never changed his mind.
But the list from which I have quoted does not complete the story of Wren’s
early essays in the scientific field, essays, be it noted, which are
overwhelmingly practical. Wren was a devotee not of pure but of applied
science.
It is probably at Wadham that Wren concerned himself with what he calls
Cheirologia. In the heirloom Parentalia is a sheet with pictures of two
hands, and on the next page, another hand and various notes showing the
working of the deaf and dumb language invented by Sir Christopher.
Though more complicated than the system now in use, it is another
evidence of the agility of Wren’s mind, and of his unwearying interest in
varying problems. But his time was not wholly spent in the laboratory.
A curious incident at Oxford in 1650 gave occasion for Wren’s poetic gift.
A girl condemned for murdering her illegitimate infant was hanged, but
revived later under the care of Dr. Petty and Thomas Willis. It is an
extraordinary story told with a wealth of unpleasant detail in a pamphlet
called News from the Dead. Following the narrative are some dozens of
“Ingenious poems on the subject by the Prime Wits” of the University,
including one by Wren. It is in a pompous vein, and cites Orpheus,
Eurydice, the Fates, and Æsculapius in the fashion of the time.
Morgan reprinted the pamphlet and poems in Phœnix Britannicus, where
they may be found by the curious. Wren’s effusion is only worth mention as
showing him in the full current of Oxford life: it is likely enough that he
had some slight part with Petty and Willis in the long business of
resuscitating the young woman.
His fellowship at All Souls did not divorce him from Wadham. In October,
1663, he was paying rent for the chamber over Wadham Gateway which
had once been part of the Warden’s lodging.
That he long held in affection the scene of his early scientific labours is
shown by his having designed and presented to the College a clock, the face
of which appears on the outside of the chapel. The works were only recently
replaced, but the old mechanism is preserved in the chapel. In the upper

corners of the face are two armorial devices, one of which appears to be the
charges from Wren’s coat-of-arms. There is also amongst the college silver
a fine sugar castor with an inscription which states that it was given by
Wren in 1653. As, however, the maker’s mark dates the piece as being
actually of 1720, it is likely that, as often happened, the old inscription on
the 1653 piece was transferred to what in 1720 seemed a more modish
design.
At Oxford he must have stayed off and on, after his marriage in 1669,
because he retained the Savilian Professorship of Astronomy until April,
1673, when he finally settled in London.

CHAPTER III
FAMILY LIFE
Of Wren’s mother nothing is known, not even the date of her death. Of his
seven sisters (the number given in Rylands’ pedigree), the only one to
survive was Susan, who became Mrs. Holder, and wisely used her great
skill in nursing during her brother’s delicate childhood. She was five years
his senior, and had no children of her own.
Christopher’s boyhood must have been clouded not a little by the
misfortunes of his stout-hearted uncle, Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely,
whose son, another Matthew, was a faithful cousin to Christopher in later
years. This is no place to tell the story of the Bishop who, with eleven of his
brethren, was impeached for resisting the Parliament in 1641, and went to
the Tower. After a short freedom in 1642 he was imprisoned again, and,
being charged with Catholic practices, languished there while Laud was
tried and beheaded, and, himself never brought to trial, remained a close
prisoner until he was released by Monk’s warrant on March 15, 1660.
Broken though he was by domestic bereavements during his eighteen years
of captivity, the brave old man took up again his episcopal duties at the age
of seventy-five.
That he remained a prisoner so long was due to his refusal to bow the knee
to the new order. It does not appear that Christopher ever saw his uncle in
the Tower, save on one great occasion, when he made an unsuccessful effort
to secure his release.
Wren was twenty-four when he became professor of astronomy at Gresham
College, and made the acquaintance of Richard Claypole, husband of
Cromwell’s favourite daughter, Elizabeth. At their dinner table Wren
became a frequent guest, the more welcome because Elizabeth Claypole
remained a devout Church of England woman. One day Cromwell strode in
and sat down to dinner, and fixing his eye on Christopher, said: “Your uncle
has been long confined to the Tower.” To Wren’s reply, “He has so, sir, but
he bears his afflictions with great patience and resignation,” the Protector
made the astonishing reply: “He may come out an he will.”

When Christopher asked if he might take that message to Bishop Matthew
from the Lord Protector’s own mouth, he got the answer: “Yes, you may.”
But when the young man hurried off to the Tower with his message, the
Bishop roundly refused to deal with the usurper on terms which meant
submission, and preferred to tarry the Lord’s leisure and owe his
deliverance to Him alone. A loyal race, the Wrens.
In 1656, not long before this incident, Dean Wren had died at Bletchingdon,
where his son-in-law, Dr. Holder, had been parson for some years, and was
buried in the chancel of the church.
It was there that Christopher must have met Faith, daughter of Sir Thomas
Coghill of Bletchingdon, Oxon. Born in 1636, she was four years younger
than Wren, who is likely to have known her since his childhood.
We know extremely little of the intimate side of Wren’s life. The only
document, but that a very precious one, is the autograph love-letter in the
heirloom Parentalia written by him to Faith. It is as follows:
Madam,
The Artificer having never before mett with a drowned watch;
like an ignorant physician has been soe long about the cure, that
he hath made me very unquiet that your comands should be soe
long deferred: however I have sent the watch at last, and envie
the felicity of it, that it should be soe neer your side, and soe
often enjoy your Eye, and be consulted by you how your time
shall passe while you employ your hand in your excellent
workes. But have a care of it, for I have put such a Spell into it;
that every Beating of the Ballance will tell you, ’tis the pulse of
my Heart, which labours as much to serve you and more trewly
than the watch; for the watch I believe will sometimes lie, and
sometimes perhaps be idle and unwilling to goe, having received
soe much injury by being drenched in that briny bath, that I
dispair it should ever be a trew Servant to you more: But as for
me (unless you drown me too in my teares) you may be
confident I shall never cease to be
Your most affectionate humble servant
Chr: Wren.

June 14.
I have put the watch in a Box that it might take noe harme, and
wrapt it about with a little leather, and that it might not jog, I
was fain to fill up a few shavings of wast paper.
The letter is dated June 14, but there is nothing to show whether it was
written soon or long before Wren’s marriage to Faith. His subscription is
hardly passionate, and we know from the enchanting letters of Dorothy
Osborne that even in Puritan days such letters were signed, “I am perfectly
yours.”
Wren’s marriage to Faith Coghill took place on December 7, 1669, at the
Temple Church, but most of his domestic events thereafter are connected
with St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, which was his parish church. His first son,
Gilbert, died an infant. His second, Christopher, was born in February,
1674-5, and baptized at St. Martin’s. This first marriage only lasted a few
years, for Faith Wren was buried at St. Martin’s on September 4, 1675.
Wren soon consoled himself, for he was married on February 24, 1676-7, at
the Chapel Royal, St. James’s Palace, to Jane, daughter of William Lord
Fitzwilliam of Lifford. By this marriage Wren had a beloved daughter, Jane,
who was baptized in November, 1677, at St. Martin’s, and a son, William,
born in June, 1679. But Wren was soon again to become a widower. His
second wife was buried at St. Martin’s on October 6, 1680. It is rather
surprising that there is no monument to either of Sir Christopher’s wives at
St. Martin’s, although some tablets from the pre-Gibbs Church are
preserved in the crypt.
Jane Wren was, by tradition, Sir Christopher’s favourite child, and when she
died at the age of twenty-six Wren suffered the greatest sorrow of his life.
Of his son Christopher’s boyhood we know little, but Sir Christopher wrote
to him in France, probably in 1698, when the young man was twenty-three,
a very charming parental letter, which has been preserved in the heirloom
Parentalia. It runs as follows:
My Dear Son,
I hope by this time you are pretty well satisfied of the condition
of the Climat you are in: if not, I believe you will ere Lent be
over, and will learne to dine upon Sallad.... If you thinke you

can dine better cheape in Italy you may trie, but I thinke the
passing the Alpes and other dangers of disbanded armies and
abominable Lodgings will ballance that advantage: but the
seeing of fine buildings I perceive temptes you, and your
companion Mr. Strong, whose inclination and interest leades
him, by neither of which I can find you are moved; but how doth
it concerne you? You would have it to say hereafter that you
have seen Rome, Naples and other fine places, a hundred others
can say as much and more; calculate whether this be worth the
expence and hazard as to any advantage at youre returne. I sent
you to France at a time of businesse and when you might make
your observations and find acquaintance who might hereafter be
usefull to you in the future concernes of your life: if this be your
ayme I willingly let you proceed, provided you will soon
returne, for these reasons, the little I have to leave you is
unfortunately involved in trouble, and your presence would be a
comfort to me to assist me, not only for my sake, but your own
that you might understand your affaires, before it shall please
God to take me from you, which if suddenly will leave you in
perplexity and losse. I do not say all this out of parsimony, for
what you spend will be out of what will, in short time, be your
owne, but I would have you be a man of businesse as early as
you can bring your thoughts to it. I hope, by your next you will
give me account of the reception of our ambassador; of the
intrigues at this time between the two nations, of the
establishment of the commerce, and of anything that may be
innocently talked of without danger and reflection, that I may
perceive whither you look about you or noe and penetrate into
what occurres, or whither the world passes like a pleasant
dream, or the amusement of fine scenes in a play without
considering the plot. If you have in ten weeks spent half your
bill of exchange besides your gold, I confesse your money will
not hold out, either abroad for yourself or for us at home to
supply you, especially if you goe for Italy, which voyage
forward and backward will take up more than twenty weekes:
thinke well of it, and let me hear more from you, for though I
would advise you, I will not discontent you. Mr. Strong hath

profered credit by the same merchant he uses for his son, and I
will thinke of it, but before I change, you must make up your
account with your merchant, and send it to me. My hearty
service to young Mr. Strong and tell him I am obliged to him for
your sake. I bless God for your health and pray for the
continuance of it through all adventures till it pleases Him to
restore you to me and your Sister and friends who wish the same
as doth
Your most affectionate Father
Chr. Wren.
Poor Billy continues in his indisposition and I fear is lost to me
and the world to my great discomfort and your future trouble.
It would seem that young Strong, the son of Wren’s famous master-builder,
was the boy’s bear-leader.
Wren is rather fretful with his son, and rather melancholy as to his own
health, but he was then only sixty-six, and was to live until past ninety. In a
different tone is the letter to young Christopher from his father, dated
October 11, 1705, the original of which is also in the heirloom Parentalia.
There is no longer the note of rebuke which followed the young man’s
extravagance in Paris. His taste had changed, and Holland wooed him rather
to the buying of good books, a traffic the old man cannot disapprove.
Poor Billy managed to live another forty years, despite Wren’s desponding
postscript. John Evelyn stood godfather on June 17, 1679, “to a sonn of Sir
Christopher Wren, surveyor of His Majesty’s buildings, that most excellent
and learned person (Evelyn never misses a chance of praising Wren), with
Sir William Fermor, and my Lady Viscountess Newport, wife of the
Treasurer of the Household.” This was poor Billy, whose sponsors show
that his father was the intimate friend of Court personages.
William seems to have been very delicate, if not defective. When Sir
Christopher died he did not bequeath anything to William, but left him in
the charge of Christopher. William lived on until March, 1738-9, and was
thus close on sixty when he died. His elder brother, Christopher, survived
until August 24, 1747, when he was seventy-two.

That Wren lived on affectionate terms with his son Christopher may be
assumed not only from the terms of his will, but from his having sunk most
of his fortune in an estate for Christopher’s benefit.
His own connection with Wroxall Abbey, Warwickshire, can be set out in
few words.
On August 29, 1713, he bought the estate for £19,600 from the trustees of
Sir John Burgoyne, Bart., who had died in 1709. Sir John’s son, Sir Roger,
died in 1711, leaving a widow, Constance, daughter of Sir Thomas
Middleton. She was one of the signatories of the deed of sale, and the
younger Christopher, then a widower, married her in 1715. Probably the
Wrens and the Burgoynes were old friends, and as Sir Roger Burgoyne had
left the estate encumbered, the sale to Wren was doubtless to clear off the
mortgages. The estate consisted of a fine Elizabethan brick house (since
Wren’s time very badly remodelled) and 1,850 acres, all of which Wren
conveyed to trustees in March, 1715, bringing them into the settlement
made on the first marriage of his son Christopher, who then became sole
owner.
That the architect ever visited the estate we do not know, but it is a tradition
that he designed a delightful garden wall planned in a series of semi-circles.
Certainly he never lived there. A succession of Christophers owned the
place until 1828, when it went to the daughter of the last of them, who
married Chandos Hoskyns, a descendant of the Sir John Hoskyns who was
Vice-President of the Royal Society when Sir Christopher filled the chair.
Catherine, the eldest daughter of Chandos Wren-Hoskyns, became in time
Mrs. Corbett Pigott, and died in 1911. From her I secured the heirloom copy
of the Parentalia for the R.I.B.A., and she gave me a copy of the rare
Kirkall engraved portrait of Wren, which had come to her from Margaret
Wren, daughter of Sir Christopher’s grandson, Stephen.
I had hoped that Sir Christopher’s will would include some personal
expressions about his family, but it is an uninteresting document, as anyone
who examines it (P.C.C. Richmond 65) may discover. He characteristically
provided that his body should be decently buried without pomp, and for the
rest one sheet of paper was enough to set out his dispositions. After
reference to the trust made at his son Christopher’s first marriage, he leaves
everything to him, desiring him “to take particular care that my son William

Wren be comfortably maintained supported and lookt after during his life.”
The will was dated April 14, 1713, and proved at London on March 27,
1723.
I consulted the will of the son Christopher (P.C.C. Potter 220) in the hope
that it might make some reference to the disposition of chattels, such as
drawings, that had belonged to his father, but it is short and uninforming.

CHAPTER IV
ASTRONOMER, MATHEMATICIAN, AND
NATURAL SCIENTIST
The sketch of Wren’s activities at Wadham (in Chapter II) shows the
variousness of his mind, but clearly his many inventions, though they make
an astonishing list, were juvenilia. His contemporary Hooke said of him,
“Since the time of Archimedes there scarce ever met in one man in so great
perfection such a mechanical hand and so philosophical a mind”; and he
describes a method of determining the parallax of comets “invented by that
incomparable mathematician Dr. Christopher Wren.”
In estimating the value of such an opinion, one of very many, I am bound to
rely on the judgment of scientific friends who have generously helped me
with this chapter, because I can only repeat Professor Lethaby’s comment
on the same text: “These things are beyond my knowledge, but I know that
they represent wonderful powers.”
We shall only understand the part played by Wren in the development of
natural science if we see that development as the work of a team rather than
of individuals. Wilkins, Boyle, Lawrence Rooke, Hooke, Seth Ward, Wallis,
Scarborough, Oughtred, Wren and many another shared a common
enthusiasm for the advancement of knowledge which showed itself in
common effort. Wren was the man to whom his associates turned for help in
solving their individual problems, because of his extraordinary ingenuity in
inventing apparatus which would establish or dispel the truth of some
scientific idea, and still more because of his ready kindness and modesty.
During the early days of the Royal Society he was not only in an especial
manner the cement which kept together the whole fabric, but the inspirer of
much work which was carried to fruition by others.
In 1645, the year when Wren invented, as a boy of thirteen, a new
astronomical instrument, the first meetings took place at which was sown
the seed from which the Royal Society sprang. Dr. Wallis, the
mathematician, Dr. Goddard, Wilkins, later Warden of Wadham, and Sir

Christopher’s father, Dr. Wren, were amongst the attendants at weekly
gatherings, when philosophy and especially natural science were discussed.
When Wallis, Wilkins, and Goddard went to Oxford in 1648-49, the London
meetings continued, but new meetings were held also at Oxford, first in Dr.
Petty’s rooms and afterwards at the apartments of Wilkins at Wadham.
When Wilkins went to Trinity, Cambridge, the Oxford men enjoyed the
hospitality of Robert Boyle.
The London meetings were held often at Gresham College and, when Wren
was fulfilling his duties as Professor of Astronomy at the College, after his
Wednesday lectures and after Rooke’s Thursday lectures. Lord Brouncker,
the friend of Pepys, John Evelyn and others were frequently at the
meetings, and the Royal Society took formal shape, after one of Wren’s
lectures, on November 28, 1660, when Brouncker, Robert Boyle, Rooke,
Wilkins and others withdrew to Wren’s private room and decided to
constitute themselves formally as a college or society. It was after Wren’s
next lecture on December 5, 1660, that Sir Robert Moray notified to the
meeting the King’s pleasure at the constitution of the society and his
promise of encouragement.
The Society of Philosophers into which the young Wren found himself
plunged owed its inspiration above all to the writings of Bacon.
Bacon was not himself a man of science in the sense that Galileo or even
Descartes was, for he made no observations and arrived at no discoveries in
any particular branch of science. But he summed up all the Renaissance
revolt against Scholasticism, and had set forth in a noble literary form a
definite system of knowledge that could be opposed to the so-called
Aristotelianism which hitherto had held sway over the minds of men.
Bacon’s guiding principle was the appeal to experiment, for his famous
“method of induction” amounts to that. The Scholastic writers worked by
deduction. They laid down their premisses, they worked out the laws of
formal logic by which they could draw deductions from them, and they
accepted the conclusions without enquiring whether the premisses could
bear the weight of the superstructure built upon them. Bacon opposed to
this his dictum, “hypotheses non fingo;” the business of the man of science
is to collect the facts without any preconceived theory, and to let the facts
themselves reveal the law which binds them together. Actually, scientific

discovery does not proceed in this way. Without a guiding hypothesis the
mind is lost in a wilderness of facts, but the value of the hypothesis must be
checked continually by its capacity to embrace the known facts and to
predict new ones. None the less, Bacon’s method was at the time a
necessary summons to experiment, and under its stimulus the young men of
the day attacked the problem of the natural world about them with the
enthusiasm of crusaders. For as a corollary to his method Bacon had
insisted upon the necessity of studying the common arts and crafts hitherto
regarded as beneath the dignity of philosophy. In the operations of the
mechanic or the smelter, and in the growth of crops, were to be found the
materials of science. So the new philosophers were universally curious and
their curiosity about things was the note of the society in which Wren grew
up and the dominant feature of his own mind until he settled down to
architecture.
Wren’s scientific equipment was primarily that of a mathematician, and to
this he added an inventive turn of mind, which developed first in the
construction of apparatus and was afterwards so nobly turned to account in
his building. As a man of science he touched everything and adorned it, but
he cannot be regarded as a supreme pioneer in any particular direction, nor
is his name associated with any fundamental discovery. As mathematician
he was abreast of all the knowledge of the day; he contributed to the
advancement of knowledge therein as in his discussions of the cycloid, but
even in that particular subject his work lacks the luminous intuition
displayed by Pascal. Nor did he break fresh ground and conceive new
methods which afterwards developed into part of the fundamental texture of
mathematics, as Wallis did with his theory of infinitesimals, or as Newton
did a few years later in a larger field.
Wren’s activity at the Royal Society in the multifarious problems which its
members examined must not be allowed to obscure the fact that,
professionally, he was an astronomer. Gresham Professor at twenty-five,
and Savilian Professor at twenty-eight, he achieved little that has survived.
The world and his own nimble mind called him to an excess of enterprises.
In 1662, his indulgent friend Sprat wrote, “The Vice-Chancellor [of Oxford
University] did yesterday send for me to enquire where the Astronomy
Professor was, and the reason of his absence so long after the beginning of
term.... He most terribly told me that he took it very ill you had not all this

while given him any account of what hindered you in the discharge of your
office.” Sprat stoutly defended Wren and urged on the angry Vice-
Chancellor that the rebuilding of St. Paul’s and the fortifying of Tangier
(Wren toyed with the latter but refused it) were of greater “concernment for
the benefit of Christendom” than “the drawing of lines in Sir Harry Savill’s
school.” It was not until 1673, however, that Wren officially turned his back
on astronomy by resigning the Savilian professorship. The chief document
of his astronomical career is his inaugural Gresham lecture in 1657, of
which Latin and English versions are printed in Parentalia. A manuscript
lecture, De corpore Saturni ejusque phasibus Hypothesis, flits irritatingly
by us as having been possessed by one William Jones, Esquire, but after
that—silence. The Gresham oration was a little pompous and for the
“politer genii” whom he espied in his audience.
“A time would come when men would be able to stretch out their eyes as
snails do (Wren worked with a thirty-six foot glass at Oxford) and extend
them to fifty feet in length, by which means they should be able to discover
ten thousand times as many stars as we can.” Of this Professor Hinks says,
“Rather poor stuff, suddenly rising into this most interesting conclusion
—‘and find the Galaxy to be myriads of them, and every nebulous star
appearing as if it were the Firmament of some other world ... bury’d in the
vast abyss of intermundious vacuum.’ What would we not give [Professor
Hinks continues] for fuller knowledge of what was in Wren’s mind when he
wrote this passage so strangely before its time, so strongly suggestive of the
island universe theory of spiral nebulæ to-day.” There was also the matter
of the method for constructing solar eclipses. The lay reader may be spared
bibliographical details, into which I have dived, but Professor Hinks makes
this significant comment: “Wren was the first to discover the graphical
method of computing eclipses that, with some modifications due to much
improved tables, remains by far the most instructive, though not the most
numerically accurate way of calculating ... and is in use to-day for the
graphical prediction of occultations.”
It was a practical thought of Wren that the Monument should be used as a
gigantic telescope, and members of the Royal Society tried so to use it, but
failed, because passing coaches caused vibrations. He had a like idea for the
great south staircase at St. Paul’s, but again, for practical reasons, it broke
down.

The biographers of Wren have made great play with a story taken from a
manuscript bound up in the heirloom Parentalia. Miss Milman referred to
“the problem which Pascal, ... under the pseudonym of Jean de Montfert,
challenged the mathematicians of England to answer by a certain day. He
accompanied the challenge with a promise of a prize of twenty pistoles to
the successful competitor. Christopher Wren solved the problem, but for
some unexplained reason never received the prize, while the problem from
Kepler which he set in return seems never to have been solved.” The facts
are rather different. In June, 1658, Pascal put out a challenge to all
mathematicians (not English alone) to find a solution for certain problems
connected with a cycloid, the curve described by a point on the
circumference of a circle when that circle rolls along a straight line—e.g., a
nail on the rim of a carriage-wheel.
In an appendix I set out the story as it has been given me by Sir Daniel Hall.
It is rather technical, but may be summed up simply. Pascal received both
attempts at solutions and replies which merely discussed germane matters.
Wren sent a partial but admirable contribution, unfortunately “without
demonstration.” It was original as far as it went, but not the complete
solution for which Pascal had asked. Cavarci, the umpire in this high
contest, wrote that Wren had merely solved the easy part of it.
It appears clear that in withholding the prize Pascal wronged neither Wren
nor the other contestants. The suggestion that Wren was the master
mathematician of Europe will not do. It is enough to affirm of him that he
was an ingenious geometrician who made several minor advances in that
science. He left no evidence of mathematical genius, a quality which ought
to be reserved to the authors of far-reaching and fruitful conceptions. The
true significance of Wren’s mathematics lies in the fine way in which he
applied them in his buildings. No one is a better representative of applied
science as compared with pure or fundamental science. Too much has also
been made of Wren’s work on the barometer. Some enthusiasts have,
indeed, tried to transfer to him the credit which belongs to Torricelli and
Pascal.
Wren repeated Torricelli’s experiment at the top and bottom of a hill, and
finding that the mercury column stood at a lower height on the top of the
hill, argued that the mercury was really balanced by the weight of the air, or,
as we now say, measured its pressure. But in this experiment Wren was

anticipated by Pascal; his experiment was regarded by his contemporaries
as made independently, but it would be hard to say that the experiment was
really Wren’s own device, so much was the question a matter of discussion
among the men of science of the time. The enunciation of the laws of
impact was made practically simultaneously by Wallis, Wren, and Huygens.
Wren’s may be regarded as the most elegant demonstration, but it was
Huygens alone who perceived that when the colliding bodies are perfectly
elastic the energy of the system, i.e., the sum of the products of the mass of
each of the bodies multiplied by the square of its velocity, remains
unchanged—one of the generalisations at the base of modern science.
Similarly, although Wren became Professor of Astronomy both at Gresham
College and then at Oxford, no outstanding observation or fundamental
discovery remains attached to his name. Speaking broadly and generally we
can say that Wren was universally accomplished in all the science of the
time, that in several directions he showed a quality of mind that was only
short of the highest, and that finally he abandoned the pursuit of pure
science too soon to have accomplished in any branch such a mass of work
as would mark him as one of the founders of that science. It must always be
remembered that Wren took to architecture when he was just over thirty,
and was immersed in a huge practice when he was thirty-five.
But perhaps Wren also was too universal. Perhaps the very ingenuity of his
mind led to distractions in too many directions. It may be, too, that his
inclinations towards the practical fusion of art, science, and administration,
which found full expression as an architect, had always tended to draw him
away from the pursuit of abstract science. We may notice that even in the
early days of Oxford he was always the demonstrator and the contriver of
experiments at the meetings of the philosophers, and later, in the early
history of the Royal Society, we find that it was to Wren that the Society
continually turned for the solution of almost any problem that came under
discussion. A letter he wrote to Lord Brouncker in 1663, as to an
appropriate show when the King visited the Society, suggests he was
already distrusting his own skill and pleasure in experiment. “Sciographical
Knacks (of which an hundred sorts may be given) are so easy in the
invention, that now they are cheap.”
The extracts from the Minute Books of the Royal Society show the
confidence of its members in Wren’s universality of mind and constructive

ability. At the second meeting of the Society on December 5, 1660, when
Sir Robert Moray brought the King’s approval, “Mr. Wren was desired to
prepare against the next meeting for the pendulum experiment.” A fortnight
later the record states “that Dr. Petty and Mr. Wren were desired to consider
the philosophy of shipping ... and that Mr. Wren bring in his account of the
pendulum experiment.”
Wren was at Oxford in the Spring of 1661, and things did not go well
without him. On May 8 we find a resolution that a letter be sent him
charging him in the King’s name to make a globe of the moon and likewise
to continue the description of several insects that he had begun. Sir Robert
Moray transmitted the royal command in a very affectionate letter. The
moon was duly delivered to the King at Whitehall, who received it with
great satisfaction.
On September 4 there is reported some correspondence with Sir Kenelm
Digby and Monsieur Frenicle concerning Wren’s hypothesis about Saturn’s
rings. Later there is a letter of Wren’s which records that, although in 1658
he had made a model to illustrate his theory of Saturn’s rings, he had
withdrawn this hypothesis as soon as he had learnt of Huygen’s more
convincing explanation.
On January 1, 1662, “Mr. Wren was requested to prosecute his design of
trying by several round pasteboards their velocity in falling.” On the 8th Dr.
Wren brought in a scheme of a weather-clock. On January 22 the pendulum
experiment is described at length together with Lord Brouncker’s
calculation of the velocity of fall, and at the same meeting it is recorded that
“Dr. Wren showed his experiment of filling a vessel with water which
emptied itself when filled at a certain height.”
On February 5 “Dr. Wren was desired to think of an easy way for a
universal measure different from that of a pendulum.” This was a question
of devising an absolute standard of length dependent upon some natural
phenomenon, which finally found expression in the metre and again in a
standard of length derived by physicists from the wave-length of light.
On February 12 “Dr. Wren proposed blacklead as a better means than oil for
preserving the pivots of the wheels of watches and clocks from grating or
wearing out.”

On March 5 “the amanuensis was ordered to attend Dr. Wren to take
directions concerning the experiment of water in the long tube.” This means
the setting up of a water barometer, with water in place of the mercury of
Torricelli’s experiment.
On September 3, 1662, it is recorded that “it was referred to Dr. Wren to
take care of making the several experiments mentioned at the last meetings
concerning the aquæ salientes,” by which we are to understand the earliest
experiments on the rise of liquids in capillary tubes. The record goes on to
say, “The request of the Society made at the last meeting to Dr. Wren about
comparing the Earl of Sandwich’s experiments was continued but it being a
business of difficulty and much calculation required more time than he
could yet obtain from his other employments.” None the less, a week later
“Dr. Wren was reminded of promoting Mr. Rooke’s observations
concerning motions of the satellites of Jupiter,” and a fortnight later still,
“Dr. Wren presented some cuts done by himself in a new way of etching
whereby he said he could almost as soon do a piece on a plate of glass as
another could draw it with a crayon on paper.” At the same meeting, too,
“Dr. Wren proposed the experiment of forcing up water in different pieces
of different diameter and different altitudes ... and was desired to bring a
description of this experiment at the next meeting....” On October 8 of the
same year “Dr. Wren offered an experiment about the undulation of
quicksilver in a crooked tube which he suggested was for the velocity of it
proportional to the vibration of a pendulum. He was desired to prosecute the
experiment and to give in an account of it.”
Sprat, in his History of the Royal Society, lays especial stress on a scheme
of work devised by Wren in the interests of agriculture.
“The second work (the first was the Doctrine of Motion) which he has
advanced, is the History of Seasons; which will be of admirable benefit to
mankind, if it shall be constantly pursued, and derived down to posterity.
His proposal therefore was, to comprehend a diary of wind, weather, and
other conditions of the air, as to heat, cold, and weight; and also a general
description of the year, whether contagious or healthful to men or beasts;
with an account of epidemical diseases, of blasts, mildews, and other
accidents, belonging to grain, cattle, fish, fowl, and insects.”

Nor must we forget Wren’s anatomical and surgical experiments. In his
early Oxford days he devised instruments (fully described by Boyle) for
making injections into the blood of a dog, which he tried very successfully
(for everyone but the dog). He also skilfully removed the spleen of another
dog which “in less than a fortnight grew not only well, but as sportive and
wanton as before.”
Bound up in the heirloom Parentalia is a most careful drawing by Wren’s
hand of the anatomy of the river eel. Instances of his versatility over the
whole field of science can be multiplied almost indefinitely.
From the end of 1662 Wren’s name began to appear less frequently in the
records of the Royal Society. His increasing preoccupation with architecture
and, later, his journey to Paris provide the reason. But these extracts do
make clear that, even when he was preoccupied with science, Wren’s
energies were to some extent dissipated by the universality of his interests
and his practical skill as an experimenter. They can be accepted as
explaining why he did not become supreme in any one branch of science,
although any loss in this direction was, perhaps, more than compensated for
by the richness of the experience and the breadth of mind that he was
thereby enabled to turn to the service of architecture.
Though architecture became an exacting mistress, he always kept in touch
with the Royal Society and, after a period as Vice-President when he was
often in the Chair, served as President in 1680. He could not give the time
to experiment, but he was an effective stimulus in the organisation of
scientific thought, and took an exceedingly active part in discussions which
ranged from comets to the making of jessamine-scented gloves with
daffodils, from Mr. Mercator’s new projection of maps to the conclusion
that “all wholesome food should have oils” (which smacks of vitamines),
from the structure of peat to the contrivance of an azimuth compass.
The incredible boy of Wadham days had become the tireless President at
fifty, immersed in the greatest architectural practice of his century, but still
the enthusiastic scientist. I find it all very astonishing.

CHAPTER V
BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE AND
VISIT TO PARIS
Wren’s work as an architect seems to have begun in 1661, when, at the
instance of John Evelyn, the King sent for him to come from Oxford to
serve as assistant to Sir John Denham, Surveyor-General to His Majesty’s
Works. Denham was a moderate poet, but no architect, and his appointment
was merely an excuse for giving him a salary. John Webb, “Inigo Jones’s
man,” had been serving Denham as an assistant and was naturally distressed
at the interposition of Wren. This is no place to attempt to estimate Webb’s
place in English architecture. He is put very high by some critics, but
Evelyn’s description of him as “Inigo Jones’s man” is probably fair. He had
attempted unsuccessfully to obtain the succession to Inigo Jones, and, on
this second failure, he seems to have retired from practice. The neglect of
him in Wren’s favour may have been a personal hardship, but nobody will
believe that English architecture was the sufferer. Webb belonged to another
generation, and the indolent Charles had a right perception when he
summoned the scientist to shape the architecture of the new era of the
Restoration.
In relation to Wren’s later and definitive appointment as Surveyor-General,
there is a reference in Pepys’ Diary which I never read without a sense of
personal relief.
On March 21st, 1668-9, Pepys met Hugh May, very grieved that he had
failed to secure the reversion of the Surveyorship of the King’s Works, on
the recent death of Sir John Denham, “by the unkindness of the Duke of
Buckingham, who hath brought in Dr. Wren, though, he tells me, he hath
been his servant for twenty years together,” and so on, “and yet the Duke is
so ungrateful as to put him by, which is an ill thing, though Dr. Wren is a
worthy man.” It was a lucky escape for English architecture, but it is
difficult to believe that Buckingham, or indeed anybody, even in such venal
times, would have denied to Wren the post which he filled so perfectly, in
favour of so sorry a fellow as Hugh May. It is worth noting that when May

died in February, 1683-4, his post as Controller of the Works at Windsor
Castle fell to Wren. If May had never been in charge at Windsor that Castle
might have been spared the indignity of the Upper Bailey, which he
designed of an ugliness so surpassing that Wyattville’s remodelling, dreary
as it is, was a vast improvement.
How May saw the duties and opportunities of Surveyor-General of the
King’s Works is shown by his consoling thoughts recorded by Pepys. The
King was kind to May and promised him a pension of £300 out of the
Works (presumably an euphemism for out of Wren’s emoluments), and that
would be better than the place, because, owing to the lack of money, he
would have had to disoblige most people, being not able to do what they
desire to their lodgings.
There are many documents to show that Wren dealt assiduously and
successfully with the daily task of “lodgings” and other trivialities
belonging to the interminable routine of his post, but it is evident that Hugh
May would have done that and no more. It was an escape.
For the first two years of Wren’s new appointment as Denham’s assistant,
he received no commissions for public works, and when the King, at the
close of the war for Tangier, offered him the task of designing the mole and
fortifications he wisely declined on grounds of health. The letter of
invitation was, it is worth noting, written by his cousin, Matthew Wren, the
bishop’s son, who was secretary to Hyde, the Lord Chancellor. Wren’s
decision lost him a good salary and risked the reversion of Sir John
Denham’s post of Surveyor-General, which was promised him if he would
go to Tangier; but we may be thankful that he resisted even so honourable
an exile, and he seems not to have suffered by it. His early labours at old St.
Paul’s will be described in the proper chapter, but his first original work in
architecture dates from early in 1663, if we except a doorway at Ely
Cathedral, of the same year. On April 29 he submitted to the Royal Society
his model for a theatre to be built at Oxford for the public acts of the
University. The Sheldonian struck a note that was to become typical of
Wren’s work, for he was not afraid to adventure on a flat ceiling with a span
of no less than 68 feet. It was a cunning piece of construction and covered
in a chamber of great interest but of uncertain design. In the same year,
1663, was begun the Chapel of Pembroke College, Cambridge, a thank-
offering made by his uncle, Bishop Matthew Wren, for coming safely

through his long imprisonment. Pembroke Chapel is a fine achievement of
much greater artistic interest than the Sheldonian, and, being completed
long before the theatre, was no doubt the model to which people turned, in
Wren’s early days of architecture, as the proof of his real capacity in his
new profession.
In 1665 he was called in by Trinity College, Oxford, to design a new inner
court with the definite instruction that he was to build a quadrangle. Wren
protested that this idea was wrong, but showed his skill in dealing with
troublesome clients thus early. Writing to Dr. Bathurst, then President of
Trinity, he said: “I am convinced with Machiavel, or some unlucky fellow,
’tis no matter whether I quote true, that the world is generally governed by
words. I perceive the name of a quadrangle will carry with it those whom
you say may possibly be your benefactors, though it be much the worse
situation for the chambers, and the beauty of the college, and of the
particular pile of building ... but, to be sober, if any body, as you say, will
pay for a quadrangle, there is no dispute to be made; let them have a
quadrangle, though a lame one, somewhat like a three-legged table.”
Wren had his way: the Trinity court is three-sided. Elmes, in his Life of
Wren, says that the additions to Trinity College, Cambridge, were going on
at the same time, but this is a characteristic and obvious blunder, for the
letter from Wren to the authorities of Trinity, quoted by Elmes, refers to the
filling of the library arches with “relieves of stone, of which I have seen the
effect abroad in good buildings.” Wren’s journey abroad did not take place
until the summer of 1665, and occupied about eight months. He started for
Paris in the first week of July, bearing a letter to the Earl of St. Albans, who
represented English virtuosity in the French capital. So much we know
from the reprint in Parentalia of a letter which returned thanks to a friend
for getting him the introduction; but the chief value of it for us is that Wren
took the opportunity to record some of his impressions. He was enchanted
with the collections of rarities that he saw, and no doubt pleased himself
with infinite conversations about science and philosophy with the scores of
distinguished men he must have met. But, unhappily, he was too busy to
keep a diary or to write home at length, and we have to be content with a
few, albeit precious, obiter dicta.
“... I hope I shall give you a very good Account of all the best Artists of
France; my Business now is to pry into Trades and Arts, I put myself into

all Shapes to humour them; ’tis a Comedy to me, and tho’ sometimes
expenceful, I am loth yet to leave it.”
Wren had a delightful and fruitful visit.
“I have,” he wrote, “busied myself in surveying the most esteem’d Fabricks
of Paris, and the Country round; the Louvre for a while was my daily
Object, where no less than a thousand Hands are constantly employ’d in the
Works; some in laying mighty Foundations, some in raising the Stories,
Columns, Entablements, etc., with vast Stones, by great and useful Engines;
others in Carving, Inlaying of Marbles, Plaistering, Painting, Gilding, etc.,
Which altogether make a School of Architecture, the best probably, at this
Day in Europe. The College of The four Nations is usually admir’d, but the
Artist hath purposely set it ill-favouredly that he might shew his Wit in
struggling with an inconvenient Situation.” This last is a shrewd bit of
criticism which did not apply to Wren’s own work, for he always made the
best of his opportunities.
It was the Abbé Charles who introduced him to Bernini, “who shew’d me
his Designs for the Louvre and of the King’s Statue ... his design of the
Louvre I would have given my skin for, but the old reserv’d Italian gave me
but a few Minutes view; it was five little Designs in Paper, for which he
hath receiv’d as many thousand Pistoles; I had only Time to copy it in my
Fancy and Memory; I shall be able by Discourse, and a Crayon, to give you
a tolerable account of it.”
He had evidently planned to spend at least six months in studying French
architecture, for he wrote: “My Lord Berkley returns to England at
Christmas, when I propose to take the Opportunity of his Company, and by
that Time, to perfect what I have on the Anvil: Observations of the present
State of Architecture, Arts and Manufactures in France.”
Unhappily, his sight-seeing seems to have absorbed all his time in Paris,
and when he got back the torrent of work carried him along and made
impossible the fulfilment of the final promise of this letter. Wren had an
easy pen, and it is sad to think that what he had “on the Anvil” never got
into the muddled mass of manuscript from which his son compiled the
Parentalia. What would we not give for more portraits of French architects
and artists like his thumb-nail sketch of Bernini, that “old reserv’d Italian”
whose plans for the Louvre never went any further? In the result, we have

lost the observations which would have been a great addition to the
literature of architecture. He did not confine himself to the buildings of
Paris. “The Palace, or if you please, the Cabinet of Versailles call’d me
twice to view it; the Mixtures of Brick, Stone, blue Tile and Gold make it
look like a rich Livery: Not an Inch within but is crowded with little
Curiosities of Ornaments: the Women, as they make here the Language and
Fashions, and meddle with Politicks and Philosophy, so they sway also in
Architecture; Works of Filgrand, and little Knacks are in great Vogue; but
Building certainty ought to have the Attribute of eternal, and therefore, the
only Thing uncapable of new Fashions. The masculine Furniture of Palais
Mazarine pleas’d me much better where is a great and noble Collection of
antique Statues and Bustos.”

PLATE II

WREN AS A MAN OF FORTY.
Probably Wren had little sympathy with the efforts of that typical
Frenchman Philibert de l’Orme to invent new Orders a century earlier; and
is there a finer epigram of architecture than the phrase in italics?
But his travels took him wider than Versailles.
“After the incomparable Villas of Vaux and Maisons, I shall but name Ruel,
Courances, Chilly, Essoane, St. Maur, St. Mande, Issy, Meudon, Rincy,
Chantilly, Verneul, Lioncour, all which, and I might add many others, I have

survey’d; and that I might not lose the Impressions of them, I shall bring
you almost all France in Paper, which I found by some or other ready
design’d to my Hand, in which I have spent both Labour and some Money.”
Would that Wren’s collections and drawings had been preserved with
something of the faithfulness which makes the Adam collection at Sir John
Soane’s Museum such a mine of information on one of Wren’s greatest
successors. One reference is helpful as showing the source of much of
Wren’s detail, though the work itself is informing without his note:
“I have purchas’d a great deal of Taille-douce, that I might give our
Country-men Examples of Ornaments and Grotesks, in which the Italians
themselves confess the French to excel.”
It would have been better if Wren had relied more on English decorative
motives.
Unfortunately there is silence in the letter on the purpose of the jaunt
abroad. Was the stay in Paris the prelude to an intended visit to Italy, or was
it an end in itself? It is odd that he should not have followed the example of
Inigo Jones and studied the Renaissance at its source, but there is no written
evidence that he ever projected an extension of his journey southwards. The
effect of the Paris journey was to give a French accent to Wren’s work
throughout his life, and to dilute the current of Palladian influence, which
was not fully renewed in England until the Earl of Burlington, William
Kent, and others returned to Inigo Jones and his Italian master as the
fountains of inspiration.
It is useless to speculate as to how Wren would have developed on a fuller
Italian basis. His art would have been more informed: he would almost
certainly have avoided the technical uncertainties that mar some of his
finest achievements: but he could hardly have lost the freedom and
inventiveness which make him one of the most individual of English
architects.
One of the results of Wren’s French orientation might have been that of
becoming a follower of Vignola rather than Palladio. In spite, however, of
Mansard’s work at Maisons and Blois, Wren, probably from the influence
of his great predecessor, Inigo Jones, remained on the whole faithful to
Palladio and the Ancients. As we shall see, the two-order system of the

exterior of St. Paul’s was a practical necessity, and not an artistic
preference. There is evidence enough from his work that he did not regard
architecture as bound up with the application of Orders to building, or as
the only means of salvation.

CHAPTER VI
TOWN-PLANNING
Perhaps the most pregnant thing that Wren learnt in France was the value of
planning on spacious lines. England was, in 1665, a country of mediæval
cities. Such classical buildings as marked the change of taste were set down
amidst surroundings of picturesque confusion. If Inigo Jones had been able
to create the great Palace of Whitehall, of which the Banqueting Hall is but
a symbolic fragment, the Grand Manner would have been established in the
land, but when Wren returned from France early in March, 1666, there was
nothing to stimulate him except the Piazza of Covent Garden and Lincoln’s
Inn Fields laid out by Inigo Jones, and his memory of the Place des Vosges
of Henri Quatre. Perhaps Bernini spoke of his great lay-out in front of St.
Peter’s.
The Great Fire of 1666 gave him the opportunity. By command of the King,
inspired doubtless by John Evelyn, who was himself an amateur town-
planner of skill, Wren “took an Exact Survey of the whole Area and
Confines of the Burning, having traced over with great Trouble and Hazard,
the great Plain of Ashes and Ruins; and designed a Plan or Model of a new
City, in which the Deformity and Inconveniences of the old Town were
remedied....”

PLATE III

WREN’S PLAN OF LONDON.
The outlines of his plan are seen in Plate III. They provided that the Royal
Exchange should stand in a great piazza from which ten streets were to
radiate; three were to run to the river, the midmost to London Bridge, and
the river was to be embanked from Blackfriars to the Tower. Round the
Exchange, on the islands formed by the radiating streets, were to be built
the halls of the Goldsmiths’ Company (the Insurance Office), the Mint, and
the Post and Excise Offices. From the Exchange and running westwards
were to be two great streets, one passing the Guildhall, surrounded by the
halls of the twelve great companies, and another leading to St. Paul’s. The
Cathedral was to stand in a great triangular piazza at the junction of the
street from the Royal Exchange and another running eastwards through two
great octagonal or round piazzas to Tower Hill.
Westwards of the Cathedral Wren devised a circular piazza from which
radiated eight streets.
It was a gallant scheme which avoided all acute angles, and set the parish
churches on sites “conspicuous and insular.” The streets were to be of three
magnitudes—the three greatest, which ran east and west, and the two chief
cross streets 90 feet wide, secondary streets 60 feet, and no lanes less than
30 feet. A great canal was to run from the Thames up Bridewell northwards

under Holborn Bridge, and all offensive trades and those that used great
fires were to be banished out of the City.

ST AUGUSTIN’S

The King approved the plan, as well he might, and then the trouble began.
Wren worked out a scheme whereby the freeholders of the City were to
surrender their properties temporarily to Commissioners. Their areas and
frontages were to be noted, and new sites given to them on the new
alinement of streets with equal advantages as to area and frontage, and,
needless to say, vastly greater advantages in amenity and ultimate value. No
proprietor would have been seated exactly on his own site, but none at any
considerable distance from it, and the intelligent grouping of trades would
have been of advantage to everyone. But the individualism of the Londoner
overbore every advantage that Wren offered him. He was content to lose the
chance of being citizen of the most convenient if not the most magnificent
City the world had seen, and incidentally of benefiting his pocket
enormously, if only he could build again on the odd-shaped sites that he had
inherited from his forefathers. But we must not blame the seventeenth-
century Londoner too much. Wren was an honest man, but the citizens
might well be suspicious lest his town-planning schemes developed into a
typical piece of Caroline jobbery. There was the little affair of a vast sum of
money voted for a noble monument to Charles the First. Wren designed it,
as bidden, and the money was forthcoming, but the monument remained on
paper, to the benefit of Charles the Second’s pocket. Wren was an apostle of
town-planning born out of due time, and his vision faded. We are
constrained as the years go by to spend millions in re-creating small scraps
of his scheme in the name of street improvements.

ST MARTIN’S & ST PAUL’S
But the labour he gave to his great plan was not all wasted. He perceived
that the Cathedral and the parish churches were architecturally the keys of
the situation, and when he came to the rebuilding of both he saw London as
a City marked by its churches. Foiled in his attempt to set them as elements

in long vistas of noble streets of uniform houses, he at least could determine
that they should give a beautiful skyline, and that the parish churches
should be grouped justly in relation to the great bulk of the domed
Cathedral.
The picture of London from the Thames which Canaletto drew in 1767
shows what we have lost with the destruction of so many of Wren’s towers
and spires and the blotting out of many others by the hideous incubus of
Cannon Street Station and rows of ten-storied warehouses.
Wren travelled much by the highway we neglect, in a boat on the Thames,
and he must have thought much of the skyline as he passed from Hampton
Court to St. Paul’s, and watched the City growing under his hand.
It seems clear that, defeated in his major design, Wren determined on the
next best policy of renewing the skyline of the old City. Generally speaking,
he rebuilt a tower where a tower only had stood and provided a spire where
one had been before. It is only from the lantern of St. Paul’s or from the
gallery of the Monument that we can now get an idea of how entrancing
London’s skyline was when Wren died, but there is still enough to be seen
to mark him as a great town-planner and to make the student breathe
ineffectual sighs that the London of 1666 was not worthy of him.

CHAPTER VII
ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL
Turner said of Wren’s Cathedral that “the dome of St. Paul’s makes
London,” but the same shrewd appreciation fell in better phrase from the
lips of a friend of mine aged seven. He had been taken by his father to St.
Paul’s, and on his return home was observed to be drawing industriously.
When questioned as to his task, he held up a rudimentary sketch of the
Cathedral, in which the crowning feature of Wren’s achievement loomed
unduly large, and replied: “I’ve drawn the Dome of London.” I have met no
better phrase of architectural criticism in more than thirty years of reading.
The monument of Italian Unity has shifted the architectural command of
Rome from the dome of St. Peter’s to the Capitoline Hill, but St. Paul’s still
crowns London with Wren’s dome.
Sir Christopher’s connection with the Cathedral dates from 1663, when the
derelict state of the old church drove the King to appoint a Commission to
consider its restoration. It is not certain, though it is likely, that both Wren
and Evelyn served as Commissioners; but little was done save casual
repairs until about May, 1666, when Wren laid before the Commission a
report descriptive of the state of the fabric with recommendations as to what
should be done.

PLATE IV

THE WELBECK PORTRAIT.
There were two parties on the Commission: one for mere patching and
mending, another, with Wren as protagonist, for a substantial reconstruction
on classical lines. Inigo Jones, when he added the great western portico, had
refaced the outside of the church with big stones, part of a general scheme
by which the cathedral would have been re-fronted, as happened to so many
of the older churches of France and Italy. Wren’s policy was to do the same
to the interior, “and it will be as easy to perform it after a good Roman
manner as to follow the Gothick Rudeness of the old Design.” He favoured
a new vault and cupola, not of lead-covered timber, but of “brick, if it be
plaistered with Stucco, which is a harder plaister.” The essence of his

proposals was, to remodel the tower and crossing. He was, in fact,
proposing to remove the four great piers of the old crossing, as Alan of
Walsingham had done at Ely, where the old central tower had collapsed. As
Wren’s uncle was Bishop of Ely, he was familiar with this bold idea. “I
cannot propose a better remedy than by cutting off the inner corners of the
Cross, to reduce this middle part into a spacious Dome or Rotundo, with a
Cupola or hemispherical roof, and upon the Cupola a Lantern with a spring
top, to rise proportionably. By this means the Church will be rendered
spacious in the middle, which may be a very proper place for a vast
auditory.” Here was the germ of the St. Paul’s which we know. On August
27, 1666, there was a lively meeting of the Commission when Evelyn, as
we learn from his Diary, backed Wren’s proposals against Chichele and
Pratt, who were against any new-fangled notions, and wanted merely to
repair the steeple on its old foundation. “But we,” writes Evelyn, “totally
rejected it and persisted that it required a new foundation, not only in regard
of the necessity, but for that the shape of what stood was very mean and we
had a mind to build it with a noble cupola, a form of church building not as
yet known in England but of wonderful grace.” It is difficult to guess why
Pratt, as a pupil of Inigo Jones, resisted the idea of extending to the interior
what the elder master had done outside. Perhaps Pratt resented the intrusion
of Wren on some personal grounds. Alternatively it is conceivable that the
Jones school were more impressed with the merits of mediæval architecture
than is commonly supposed. As it turned out, Chichele and Pratt were right
about the solidity of the old central piers. Contrary to experience outside
London they proved very difficult to demolish. It may be that some
tradition of the old Roman secret remained in London, where old walls are
a byword for resistance to removal. If Wren had known as much about
mortars as the old builders, much of the trouble with his St. Paul’s would
have been avoided.
After much argument it was agreed the innovators should produce a plan
and estimate. This design is preserved at All Souls, and shows an inner and
outer dome surmounted by a lantern crowned with a huge openwork
pineapple 68 feet high, of what Sir Reginald Blomfield justly calls “a
monstrous and horrible design.”
But the scheme went no further. On Sunday, September 2nd, within a week
of the Commission meeting, the Great Fire broke out. By the 7th Pepys saw

the “miserable sight of Paul’s Church, with all the roof fallen and the body
of the quire fallen into St. Faith’s.” Evelyn was there the same day and
infinitely concerned: “Thus lay in ashes that most venerable Church.” The
destruction was complete.
Very soon after the Fire, Wren was appointed principal architect for
rebuilding the whole City, and set about fitting part of St. Paul’s ruins for
temporary use in Divine Service. On January 15, 1667, the King made order
to that effect, and on March 5 a sub-committee was set up to do something.
They seem to have been lamentable dullards, for they still harped on the
idea of patching up the ruins, and attempted to do so, despite Wren’s
protests. He seems to have followed the wise course of leaving them to their
tinkerings and to the Nemesis of a tottering fabric, with good and inevitable
results. After the shattering experience of the Fire, the new facing of large
stones could not be secured properly to the old walls. A year and some
money had been wasted before Dean Sancroft wrote to Wren, then at
Oxford, on April 25, 1668, to say: “What you whispered in my ear, at your
last coming hither, is come to pass. Our work at the west end of St. Paul’s is
fallen about our ears.” Sancroft expected worse would follow, confessed
that they were helpless without Wren, and begged him to come to London.
It would appear that Wren was not satisfied as to their change of heart, and
thought it wiser to let them muddle along into worse trouble before he went
to their aid.
They still went on patching until things got quite hopeless, when Wren
received a peremptory order from the Archbishop and the other
Commissioners to attend with all speed. In one thing Sancroft seems to
have been wiser than Wren. He was all for the planning of a “design,
handsome and noble, and suitable to all the ends of it, and to the reputation
of the city and the nation, and to take it for granted that money will be had
to accomplish it.” Wren wanted to know what money they would provide
before he set about a design, and to delay action until men’s minds were
less distracted with all the troubles that followed the Fire. After more
argument Wren convinced everyone that the first business was to give up all
ideas of patching and to sweep the site clear of the ruins. This task lasted
until April, 1674.

The Second Design for St. Paul’s, also known as the “Rejected
Design” and the “Model Design.”
The story of Wren’s many designs for the new Cathedral is confusing and
need not be followed here in detail. The First Design, made before the Fire,
has been mentioned. The Second Design, also known as the “Rejected
Design” and the “Model Design,” was an attempt to gratify “the taste of the
Conoisseurs and Criticks with something coloss and beautiful, conformable
to the best stile of the Greek and Roman architecture.”
This was one of several submitted to the King, and was approved by Royal
Warrant of November 12, 1673. A model of it was made, now in the South
Kensington Museum, and its plan and perspective are reproduced here. It
represented a great break from traditional Cathedral treatment. Planned as a
Greek cross, to which a short western arm (a vestibule or narthex) was
added later, a central space 120 feet in diameter was formed by eight great
piers carrying a dome, and the ambulatory included four shallow domes.
The octagonal church of Santa Maria della Salute gives perhaps as good an
idea as any of the general scope of the scheme, which Sir Charles Barry
thought might supply a hint for English church building. The western

vestibule was roofed with a smaller dome and finished with a colonnaded
portico. It was a noble idea, but the clergy thought it unsuitable for services,
and the absence of chapels annoyed the Duke of York, who, with his
supporters, still hoped for a restoration of the old religion. Wren had to
abandon the scheme, not, it is said, without actual tears. It is recorded in
Parentalia that “the Surveyor, in private Conversation, always seem’d to set
a higher value on this Design, than any he had made before or since; as
what was laboured with more Study and Success; and (had he not been
over-rul’d by those, whom it was his Duty to Obey) what he would have put
into Execution with more Chearfulness and Satisfaction to himself than the
latter.”

Plan of the “Rejected Design.”
About eighteen months passed before the Third Design was submitted to
the King and approved by warrant dated May 14, 1675. It is known as the
Warrant Design. So unworthy is it of Wren’s genius that his apologists have
been ingenious in explaining it away. Miss Phillimore thought it the result
of overwork and worry. Loftie believed that Wren was “in the nearest thing
to a bad temper of which his meek and quiet spirit was capable,” and
pitched it at Charles as a joke, thinking that the King might as well sign the

silliest design he could produce as he had rejected a sound scheme. Be that
as it may—and it is not very like Wren to play the fool—Charles passed this
preposterous design as “very artificial proper and useful,” giving Wren
“liberty in the prosecution of his work, to make some Variations, rather
Ornamental than Essential, as from time to time he should see proper, and
to leave the Whole to his management.” The design now reproduced carries
its own condemnation on its face. The western towers and the portico with
its single skinny Order were exceedingly feeble, and the crowning of the
dome by a kind of parody of St. Bride’s steeple is a feature that is best
passed over in silence.
But if it were not simply a lark, it might have been the result of a demand
for a spire that should remind London of the glory of St. Paul’s old spire,
which had been the highest in Europe.

West Elevation of the “Warrant Design.”
Happily Wren interpreted his permission for ornamental variations by
drastic changes in essentials in the elevations, but he did not greatly change
the “warrant” plan. His frame of mind may well be judged by the note,
which follows the recital of the 1675 Warrant, in Parentalia: “From that
time, the Surveyor resolved to make no more Models, or publickly expose
his Drawings, which (as he had found by Experience) did but lose Time,
and subjected his Business, many Times, to incompetent Judges.”
Therefore, just as the present Houses of Parliament grew out of the castle
design, done by Barry in 1836, by his twenty years of thought and work, so
the grandeur of St. Paul’s developed with the mind of Wren incessantly
occupied in its creation for nearly double that time. No one could help him

in this gradual evolution of his thought, but many could, and did, obstruct
its execution.
The taking down of the vast ruins of the old Cathedral made a heavy task,
and Wren took to gunpowder for demolishing the piers of the old central
tower. This worked well, but on its second employment by a subordinate,
when Wren was out of town, too much gunpowder was used and a stone
was blown into a neighbouring house. No bones were broken, but Wren was
told to find less desperate methods and achieved his end with “that ancient
Engine in War, the Battering-ram.” Wren’s troubles with the foundations
made a long and too technical story for so slight a sketch as this, but it is
fair to his memory to set down that though some early trouble was
experienced from settlements which young Edward Strong, the son of
Wren’s master-mason, was called in to repair, the present troubles are due
more to the draining of the subsoil by recent engineering works, such as
great sewers, and to the use of rubble inside a casing of ashlar, than to any
defect in the foundation design. One notable change in the design of the
West Front must be emphasised because it marks the influence, in this case
the overmastering influence, of material over design. Wren devised the
front with a single great Order (as Inigo Jones had done in the portico he
added), therein following the scheme of St. Peter’s at Rome. Bramante had
quarried at Tivoli pieces big enough for the drums of his columns, but had
to spoil his cornices for lack of stones of adequate size. Wren was defeated
in his hope of securing drums big enough from the Portland, Rock Abbey,
and other quarries, and “for these Reasons the Surveyor concluded upon
Portland-stone, and was able to use two Orders and by that Means to keep
the just Proportions of his Cornices; otherwise he must have fallen short of
the Heighth of the Fabrick, which now exerts itself over all the Country, as
well as City, as it did of old, when that Structure, tho’ rude, was lofty and
majestick.”

PLATE V

BUST BY EDWARD PEARCE AT THE
ASHMOLEAN, DONE ABOUT 1673, AND
SHOWING WREN AS A MAN OF FORTY-ONE.
The first stone of the new church was laid in 1675, and during thirty-five
years, from the forty-third to the seventy-eighth of the architect’s life, St.
Paul’s was his constant preoccupation. Troubles were many. The 1675 plan
was without the two western chapels (that now used by the Order of St.
Michael and St. George and its fellow on the north side). They were
introduced into the scheme by the insistence of the Duke of York. But the

fundamental novelty of St. Paul’s, the double dome, was present in his pre-
Fire design, and whatever else was changed, that remained.
Persons of Revival Gothic mind have been much troubled in conscience by
the “falsity” of this treatment, though it has the admitted result of giving an
absolutely right effect inside and out, and has been followed in nearly all
the subsequent domes of this scale. The provision of an inner and an outer
dome is held nowadays to be justified abundantly by the result. The brick
cone that triumphantly carries the lantern, which is as high and large as
many a church tower, is one of the many evidences of Wren’s engineering
skill.
The architect was fortunate in the men who carried out his work. Edward
Strong, the master-mason, and Richard Jennings, the master-carpenter, were
faithful servants in carrying out the bones of the great structure; and such
artists as Grinling Gibbons in the choir stalls, and Tijou in the wonderful
iron screens served Wren’s turn to perfection. At St. Paul’s there is none of
that carelessness of detail which defaces many of the City churches. There
is little doubt that Wren was constantly on the works, watching everything
in detail, revising and directing on the spot the great fabric as it grew under
his hand.

Plan of St. Paul’s as built.
The dotted lines show the alinement of railings as intended by Wren.
The cost of rebuilding was borne by the “coal-money,” a duty of 1s. 6d. a
chaldron on all coal imported into London, of which four-fifths were
allocated to St. Paul’s. Even so the works were often in danger for lack of
funds, and money had to be borrowed in advance of the coal-money
receipts.

PLATE VI

THE WEST FRONT OF ST. PAUL’S.
The funds received from all sources, including borrowings, amounted in
1700 to £1,167,474, but part of this went in interest paid out and in repaying

loans and part in acquiring neighbouring property. The net cost is given by
Longman as £746,661.
The choir was opened for Divine Service on December 2, 1697, on the
Thanksgiving Day for the Peace on the Treaty of Ryswick. By 1708 the
dome was ready to be covered. The Committee wanted copper to be used.
Wren held out for lead, and lead it was and is. In 1710 young Christopher
Wren was deputed by his father to lay the top-stone of the lantern which
surmounts the dome, and did it in the presence of Sir Christopher and
Edward Strong and other workmen who had been engaged on the building.
It was a proud day for the old man of seventy-eight who had carried
through a unique task despite every difficulty.
He was treated with incredible meanness. From the start of the work he had
received the meagre salary of £200 a year, and in 1696-7 an Act “for the
completing and adorning the Cathedral Church” was passed which included
the miserable provision “to suspend a moiety of the Surveyor’s salary until
the said Church should be finished, thereby the better to encourage him to
finish the same with the utmost diligence and expedition.”
It was a spiteful business, which Wren bitterly resented, and not until
Christmas, 1711, did he secure the payment of the arrears of half-pay on the
passing of an Act which certified the Cathedral was finished. But even then
much remained to be done, and in the doing of it Wren was hampered and
thwarted at every turn by the narrow-minded Commissioners. It is a
miserable story and hardly worth telling but that Wren’s reputation needs to
be defended as to some features of St. Paul’s which he resisted ineffectually.
The squabble about the enclosing railings is no longer interesting because
they have disappeared, but the painting of the inner dome by Thornhill with
opaque masses of figures instead of the mosaic Wren had intended was a
severe trouble to him. Still worse was the insistence of the Commissioners
on the balustrade which crowns the upper cornice. Wren’s letter to them in
October, 1717, was a vigorous protest for a man of eighty-five. “I take
leave, first, to declare that I never designed a balustrade. Persons of little
skill in architecture did expect, I believe, to see something they had been
used to in Gothic structures, and ladies think nothing well without an
edging. I should gladly have complied with the vulgar taste, but I suspended
for the reasons following.” The reasons were good and many, but the
Commissioners preferred to be lady-like, and the balustrade was put up.

This was in 1717. In 1718 King George the First superseded Wren as
Surveyor-General in favour of a rascal called William Benson, so
incompetent that he was dismissed ignominiously a year later.
PLATE VII

ST. PAUL’S UNDER THE DOME.
From an old engraving dedicated to Bishop Van
Mildert by Josiah Taylor.
In Wren’s own writing there appears in the MS. chronology of his life and
works an entry in Greek which runs, translated:

April 26, 1718.
And there arose a king that knew not Joseph.
And Gallio cared for none of these things.
He retired to his house at Hampton Court observing “Nunc me jubet
Fortuna expeditius philosophari” and, in a strain of piety, which was as
truly characteristic as the Stoic note, “If I glory, it is in the singular mercy
of God, who has enabled me to begin and finish my great work, so
conformable to the ancient model.” After more than two hundred years we
rejoice to add, in the words of the Bicentenary Service, “We render Thee
thanks, O Lord, for the singular gifts which Thou didst bestow upon Thy
servant, Christopher Wren.”
The malevolence of his masters at the Cathedral pursued him to the grave,
but it gave his son the opportunity of inventing an immortal epitaph. Sir
Christopher was buried in the crypt, but the suggestion of a monument was
rejected by the authorities.
So the younger Christopher, seeking to explain the absence of a fitting
memorial in the place of his father’s greatest triumph, wrote on the plain
tablet which marks his resting-place, as the closing words of his epitaph,
“SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS: CIRCUMSPICE.”
But the fatuous proceedings of Commissioners and King alike have faded
into their proper perspective, and St. Paul’s remains the supreme monument
of the genius of a single architect.
What, in fact, did Wren achieve in the building of St. Paul’s? Much can be
written of his handling of the Orders, of his structure of the dome, of the
details of the plan, and so forth; but there are broader issues involved. St.
Paul’s gave the first opportunity since the Middle Ages for the creation of a
Cathedral in England, and Wren’s task was a Protestant Cathedral. Hitherto
the Cathedral builder had made two churches under one roof, a choir for
Canons, whether secular or regular, or for monks, and a nave for the laity,
the two divided by a solid screen which prevented nave worshippers from
seeing the high altar. Wren’s plan was a half-way house between the
mediæval type and the idea of St. Peter’s with the high altar as the central
feature under the dome. It was a classical translation of the plan of his
uncle’s Cathedral of Ely, in so far as it retained the aisle vistas by

supporting the dome on eight piers instead of four. It was English in that it
set the altar in a ritual choir well to the east of the crossing. It was
Protestant and characteristic of Wren’s views in its provision of an
admirable “auditory.”
St. Paul’s Cathedral may fairly be called the apogee of English Baroque,
because it is the finest English expression of what Mr. Geoffrey Scott calls
the Architecture of Humanism. It represents with peculiar faithfulness the
outlook of the best minds of the last half of the seventeenth century, for
Wren was one of them, and had the power to give it expression. St. Peter’s,
the only church with which it is not unnaturally compared, was a pasticcio
of many minds brought to bear in succession on a far larger but not
æsthetically more difficult problem, and it suffers from a consequent
confusion, as well as from its abnormal scale. St. Paul’s was the work of
one commanding personality, who developed indeed in the course of its
building—the difference between the warrant plan and the church itself is
proof enough of that—but he did so consistently and with a single aim.
Westminster Abbey is the supreme flower of Gothic art in England, if not in
the world, and the perfect expression of the Age of Faith. St. Paul’s is a no
less perfect emblem of what England could make of humanistic ideals in art
joined with robust English Churchmanship expressed through so sincere an
Anglican as was Sir Christopher Wren.
St. Paul’s is incomparable—the word is used advisedly—as a piece of
architecture, and it is prodigiously English.

CHAPTER VIII
THE CITY CHURCHES
The parish churches of Sir Christopher Wren once numbered fifty-three. Of
these, St. Andrew Holborn, St. Clement Danes, and St. James Piccadilly,
cannot rightly be included amongst the City churches, as they are outside
“the square mile.” Of the remaining fifty, St. Dunstan-in-the-East, St. Mary
Aldermary, St. Sepulchre, and the destroyed St. Christopher, were only
repaired by Wren. Fifteen have been wholly destroyed, and of St. Mary
Somerset only the tower remains. Only thirty therefore remain in the City,
and of these many have been so modernised that their value has in part
disappeared.

ST VEDAST
Many devout admirers of Wren have done his memory a serious disservice
by indiscriminate praise. It is no doubt an amiable fault, but it does much to
confuse serious public issues, such as the question of “the nineteen doomed
churches” which has lately agitated the public mind and will do so again. I

will not discuss here whether it is ever permissible to remove any church,
but if destruction can in any circumstances be allowed, discussion must
revolve round the quality of what is doomed. It is common form for
disputants to talk as though all city churches were Wren churches, and all
Wren churches perfect churches. In point of fact thirteen of the nineteen
were by Wren. Of the six that were not, St. Mary Woolnoth, by Hawksmoor,
is of as great importance as a Wren church, and much more interesting than
many. Of the “doomed” thirteen by Wren, St. Vedast Foster Lane, is said
now to be out of danger: the steeple is superb, the nave merely a restoration
with some good fittings left. The leaded lantern on the tower of St. Nicholas
Cole Abbey, is exceedingly valuable, and its removal would be a crime, but
it would be a waste of tears to shed them on the modernized nave. St.
Stephen’s, Coleman Street, also has a pleasant little lantern, but if anyone
supposes the interior is typical Wren he cannot detect the more glaring feats
of the restorer.

ST ALBAN
In the case of St. Michael Paternoster Royal, St. Michael Cornhill, St. Mary
Aldermanbury, St. Anne and St. Agnes, St. Alban Wood Street, and All
Hallows Lombard Street, there is enough of characteristic Wren in tower or
church, or both, to justify retention; but it is difficult to be enthusiastic

about St. Clement Eastcheap, now, and it cannot have been easy before the
church was modernized. If a hand were laid on a stone of St. Magnus
London Bridge, it would be an abomination.
The tower of St. Dunstan-in-the-East is unique for its date, and of quite
extraordinary interest: any idea of removing it should be resisted with
vehemence. But why anyone should be the least concerned at the
disappearance of the body of the church is known only to those who detect
beauty in the Gothic adventures of Messrs. Laing and Tite in the year 1810.
Of St. Mary-at-Hill the ugly 1780 tower replaced a mediæval tower which
escaped the fire, and the interior has been somewhat havocked in latter
days.
St. Clement Eastcheap has some good fittings, but, always small and
unimportant, its quality has been greatly modified by the restorer.
These notes are set down in the hope that the case for the maintenance
forever of the nobler works of Wren will not be vitiated, confused, and, in
the minds of plain men, made ridiculous by hysterical praise of his meanest
buildings from which such small quality as they once possessed has been
removed by modern vandalisms.

ST DUNSTAN’S
The achievement of Sir Christopher Wren was vast, and for that very reason
there must be discrimination between those buildings on which he lavished
his utmost personal care and those which, in the press of a huge practice,

were designed mainly by assistants and carried out probably with the
slenderest supervision by the master.
A glance at the Chronology I print in an appendix will show the sort of
pressure at which Wren worked during the ten years following the Fire.
Examination of the Accounts of the City Churches reveals that payments
began to be made in 1670 to the builders of seventeen churches, and six
years later the number had grown to twenty-eight.
Actual work on practically the whole of the fifty-three had been completed
by 1690. None was begun after 1686 and payments were made on eight
only between 1690 and 1695.
Wren did comparatively little after 1700 except the completion of St. Paul’s
and Greenwich. This means that the great majority of his vast bulk of
achievement was done within about thirty years.
Is it any wonder that some of his churches show signs of haste and want of
thought? Can we suppose anything but that some of them were left largely
to assistants?
The year of his first marriage was his annus mirabilis, for during 1669 he
must have been working on the plans for the seventeen churches which
began to be built in 1670, and he was developing the design of St. Paul’s at
the same time.
Evelyn’s word prodigious seems to meet the case.
I have already referred to the towers and spires as showing Wren’s sure
touch as a tower-planner, but the amazing variety of their treatment is
notable evidence of Wren being, par excellence, the architect of adventure.
As I wrote many years ago in a detailed examination[A] of the leaded spires,
“he created within the square mile of the city more forms of steeples than
all the architects of the Middle Ages, and if, as was inevitable, some pay the
penalty of rash experiment, others made an assured success.” Twenty-eight
of the towers are crowned with either spire or lantern, nine of stone, and
nineteen of leaded timber. Some are true spires, others spire-form steeples,
and the rest lanterns: this classification is loose and arbitrary, but “Wren’s
masterful way of playing with architectural elements and combining them
in astonishing ways makes havoc of any orderly description.”

The preponderance of leaded spires may be attributed partly to his affection
for the most characteristic English metal—he chose it for St. Paul’s dome
after considering copper—and partly to their cheapness as compared with
stone.

ST MAGNUS

St. Swithin’s Cannon Street has a spire of Gothic type, and Wren stepped
from the square of the tower to the octagon of the spire by trimming the
tower angles to a splay, a short cut no mediæval builder would have
employed. At St. Margaret’s Pattens Rood Lane, the tower finishes
normally with pinnacles at the corners, and the spire, instead of being
leaded with vertical rolls as at St. Swithin’s, is treated with a series of sunk
panels, a beautiful and ingenious method: St. Margaret’s spire is indeed a
faultless work. Wren did nothing in stone to match the form of these two.
Exquisite in its delicacy is the leaded needle spire of St. Martin Ludgate, set
on an arcaded lantern which grows in turn out of an ogee roof, and the latter
break is marked by a railed balcony. Obelisks take the place of a spire at St.
Margaret Lothbury, a steeple of miraculous simplicity, and at St. Mildred’s
Bread Street. The tower of St. Lawrence Jewry is crowned by a more
massive composition, and the outline of St. Augustine’s Watling Street is a
little uncertain. At St. Benet Paul’s Wharf the combination of dome and
lantern is perfect in its little way.

ST MARGARET’S PATTENS
Amongst the stone steeples St. Mary-le-Bow and St. Bride’s Fleet Street
will always have champions to argue which is the greater. Bow Tower has a
romantic, almost Jacobean, quality which contrasts strongly with the austere
outline of St. Bride’s. It may be significant of a special importance attached

to it by Wren that it is the only tower which has a bill of account, separate
from that of the church, in the full priced accounts which I have dealt with
in detail elsewhere. It cost £7,388 and the church £8,071, whereas St.
Bride’s altogether accounted only for £11,430.

ST BRIDE’S
The question of the money spent on the City churches is of considerable
interest. The total paid out was £263,786 10s. 4½d., and the amounts
entered up against each church were corrected to farthings. These figures

exclude most of the internal fittings, which must have been the gift of pious
parishioners. The MS. accounts in the Bodleian are abstracted in my
Archæologia paper,[B] and give the names of every mason, bricklayer,
plumber, painter, etc., employed, with the amounts he (or sometimes she)
received. I transcribed the complete bills for St. Mary-le-Bow with Bow
Tower and for St. Stephen’s Walbrook. The latter cost £7,652 13s. 8d., and
only six churches exceeded that sum. In some ways it is the most notable of
them all, for Wren contrived to give the effect of nave, aisles and crossing
to a plain room by his ingenuity in carrying a circular dome on eight arches
which rest on an entablature supported by twelve columns. East of the dome
is one groined bay, and west of it two groined bays divided by four more
columns: the side aisles have flat ceilings. The plan is thus an oblong room
with sixteen free columns, but so cleverly disposed as to produce the variety
of effect described above. Sir Reginald Blomfield justly says of the details
that they are “coarse and irrelevant,” but the interior is a masterpiece of
scenic planning, and the dome a not unworthy trial piece for what followed
at St. Paul’s. A melancholy remodelling in 1847-8, the plans of which are
preserved at the R.I.B.A., destroyed some of the character of the church, but
the accompanying illustration shows it in the “unimproved” state as Wren
left it.

PLATE VIII

ST. STEPHEN’S, WALBROOK.
St. Lawrence Jewry is another of the churches in which the architect was
not pinched for funds. It cost £11,870, but is on a somewhat uninteresting
plan—oblong, with an aisle on one side only. Here, as in almost every
church he built, Wren was a determined economist of space, and with good

reason. About eighty churches had been destroyed in the Fire, only fifty
were rebuilt, and every sitting was of importance. So he did not square up
his building if the site was irregular, but made the best, usually a very
ingenious best, of whatever odd shape he had to cover in. And there was
another consideration. It is obvious from the sums paid for many of the
churches, as well as from the evidence of the fabrics, that Wren did not pull
down an old wall if he could mend it and save it. There is, therefore, all the
more reason to respect these City churches, which retain so much history in
their walls, going back even to the earliest times. Always practical and
always an opportunist of the right sort, he made the best job he could with
the materials and money he had at disposal. A more general realisation of
this would prevent criticism of details, which ought to be addressed rather
to parsimonious clients than to the architect. Sometimes, however, he made
a brilliant excursion to meet the needs of an odd-shaped site as at St. Benet
Fink, which he planned as a decagon. This enchanting church stood behind
the Royal Exchange and had a beautiful little dome and lantern on its tower:
the late Mr. Peabody now sits in bronze on the site. At St. Antholin’s, a
church in Watling Street, with a superb stone tower and spire, all swept
away in circumstances of infamy, he got over a swerve in the street
alinement by splaying the plan at the west end. At St. Mary Abchurch and
St. Swithin’s, he had short, broad, and slightly irregular sites to deal with,
and covered in a square with a dome and let the rest work out as it would.
St. Mildred Bread Street is a longer oblong which Wren treated very
delightfully by covering the middle with a dome and the ends with round
arches. The need to house large congregations led him to provide galleries
at Christ Church Newgate Street, St. James Piccadilly, St. Bride’s, St.
Andrew-in-the-Wardrobe, and elsewhere.
Wren’s outlook on the whole problem of parish-church design was
indicated with his usual clarity in a letter which he wrote to guide his fellow
Commissioners in the task of building fifty new churches in Queen Anne’s
reign. Written when he was nearing eighty, the letter sums up the experience
of an amazing lifetime of church building.

ST MILDRED·BREAD ST
He is strongly against burials in churches and commends the idea of
cemeteries on the outskirts of the towns which will “bound the excessive
growth of the City with a graceful border, which is now encircled with
scavengers’ dung stalls.”

ST BRIDE’S
In the siting of churches, Wren is against too nice an observation of “east
and west in the position, unless it falls out properly,” and wants to see them
brought as forward as possible into the larger and more open streets. “Such
fronts as shall happen to lie most open to view should be adorned with

porticoes, both for beauty and convenience; which together with handsome
spires or lanterns rising in good proportion above the neighbouring houses
(of which I have given several examples in the City of different forms) may
be of sufficient ornament to the town, without a great expense for enriching
the outward walls of the churches, in which plainness and duration ought
principally, if not wholly, to be studied....”
A long paragraph is devoted to the question of materials. He complains
bitterly of the badness of the available bricks, despite the fact that London
earth will yield a brick more durable than “any stone our island affords.”
Wren is all for Portland-stone for windows and doors, and likes oak for
roofs “because it will bear some negligence. The churchwardens’ care may
be defective in speedy mending drips: they usually whitewash the church,
and set up their names, but neglect to preserve the roof over their heads.”
There is an oddly topical flavour in the note that “the wars in the North Sea
make timber at present of excessive price,” and a prophecy of Imperial
trading in: “I suppose, ere long, we must have recourse to the West Indies,
where most excellent timber may be had for cutting and fetching.”
As to roof coverings, “our tiles are ill-made and our slates not good: lead is
certainly the best and lightest covering, and being of our own growth and
manufacture, and lasting, if properly made, for many hundred years, is,
without question, the most preferable; though I will not deny but an
excellent tile may be made to be very durable: our artisans are not yet
instructed in it, and it is not soon done to inform them....” If the Gothic
Revivalists had worked on Wren’s lines, the Church would not now be
saddled with a legacy of badly built Kentish rag and rubble churches and
spires, thinly roofed with Welsh slates, an endless anxiety to parishes unable
to find money to remedy original defects of construction.
Wren’s next point is of the essence of the problem which he was facing,
how to provide the accommodation required for the people.
Even if the new fifty churches were to hold 2,000 apiece, there would not
be room enough. “The churches, therefore, must be large, but still, in our
reformed religion, it should seem vain to make a parish church larger than
that all who are present can both hear and see. The Romanists, indeed, may
build larger churches; it is enough if they hear the murmur of the Mass, and

see the elevation of the Host; but ours are to be fitted for auditories.” Wren
then quotes his St. James’s Piccadilly as the most practicable model of “a
single room so capacious, with pews and galleries, as to hold above 2,000
persons, and all to hear the service and both to hear distinctly and see the
preacher.” He claims for St. James’s that it is a beautiful and convenient
form, with “no walls of a second order, nor lanterns nor buttresses, but the
whole roof rests upon the pillars, as do also the galleries ... the cheapest of
any form I could invent.” St. James’s Piccadilly cost £8,500, so its
accommodation for 2,000 persons worked out at £4 5s. a seat. This church
is really in the line of development of the old English timber Hall so far as
its constructive idea is concerned. It lent itself to the passing need of
galleries, but they are not essential to the idea, as is sometimes supposed.
In discussing the place for the pulpit Wren has some shrewd things to say
about the enunciation of English parsons, which hold good to-day: “A
Frenchman is heard further than an English preacher because he raises his
voice and sinks not his last words ... an insufferable fault in the
pronunciation of some of our otherwise excellent preachers.” Wren would
have appreciated the similar advice of a modern bishop to a class of
candidates for ordination, that they should not drop their voices at the end
of a sentence “lest the congregation might suppose, however erroneously,
that they had lost something.” On the vexed question of seating the people,
our architect has some shrewd words: “A church should not be so filled
with pews, but that the poor may have room enough to stand and sit in the
alleys: for to them equally is the Gospel preached.”
We may guess that Wren would have been all for the rush-bottomed chair if
it had been invented in his day: “It were to be wished there were to be no
pews, but benches: but there is no stemming the tide of profit, and the
advantage of pew-keepers.”
I have quoted at length from this letter in order to mark the massive
common sense which Wren brought to the solution of his problems. Mr.
Arthur Bolton gives me the interesting parallel of 1818, when Sir John
Soane reported to the Government on the national church building scheme.
His recommendations show that he worked on his great predecessor’s report
and he even sent to St. James’s and measured it as a typical instance. As,
however, the year 1818 preferred numbers to quality, the results fell far
below those of the earlier century.

It was Wren’s quality of common sense as much as the genius of the artist
that made his City churches what they are, practical solutions of practical
difficulties and instinct with the English spirit of compromise, but none the
less the greatest group of churches created in any country by the genius and
practical wisdom of one man.

CHAPTER IX
CHELSEA, HAMPTON COURT, AND
GREENWICH
Mr. Basil Champneys has recorded a notable observation by Thomas
Carlyle on Chelsea Hospital: “I had passed it, almost daily, for many years
without thinking much about it, and one day I began to reflect that it had
always been a pleasure to me to see it, and I looked at it more attentively,
and saw that it was quiet and dignified and the work of a gentleman.” This
was evidently a favourite theme with Carlyle, for William Allingham’s
Diary for June 25, 1874, records a similar phrase with the addition that the
Hospital was “admirably adapted for its uses.” Carlyle’s devotion to Wren’s
memory had an odd repercussion. When William De Morgan called on the
Sage to beg him on behalf of William Morris to join the Anti-Scrape
Society, Carlyle was cold at first, but a reference to the dealings of the
Ecclesiastical Commissioners with Wren’s churches set him alight. He
ended a panegyric on Wren with “he was a very great man, of extraordinary
patience with fools,” and glared round at the company reproachfully. Morris
rather winced when Carlyle, in a letter accepting membership of the Anti-
Scrape, referred to the City churches as “marvellous works, the like of
which we shall never see again,” and his hatred of the Renaissance never
ceased to blind him to Wren’s genius.
It would have been well if the Society had been more active, in the past, in
defence of Wren’s churches. The narrow mediævalism of the latter half of
the nineteenth century wrought havoc even where it failed to destroy.
Stained glass and other alien trappings have prejudiced far too many of his
fine interiors. One church architect of the type responsible for these things
was finely reproved with the reminder that Wren was just as good a High
Churchman as he was.

PLATE IX

CHELSEA HOSPITAL: THE MAIN PORTICO.
The site of Chelsea Hospital had been given by the King to the Royal
Society soon after its foundation, but it was an inconvenient possession, and
the Society sold it back to the King for the foundation of a Royal Hospital

for disabled soldiers. Sir Stephen Fox, a retired army contractor,
supplemented the King’s benefactions, and on May 25, 1682, the inevitable
Evelyn went with Fox and Wren to Lambeth to secure the Archbishop of
Canterbury’s approval to the plot and design or, as we should say, plan and
elevations. Ten weeks later Evelyn was at Chelsea with Fox to see the
foundations started. Wren was a good deal more than architect to the
Hospital. It was during his Presidency of the Royal Society that the land
was re-conveyed to the King: he carried the business through with
characteristic despatch, and the statutes governing the charity were of his
drafting. The buildings were completed in 1692, and no better praise of
them than Carlyle’s can be invented. Wren shows himself in one of his
characteristic moods as a sane economist where the purpose of the building
makes economy an æsthetic as well as a practical virtue. The Hospital is a
liberal education in the handling of London brickwork. When Sir John
Soane, in the days of Nash stucco, had to add an Infirmary building, he was
careful to design in brick and content to despise the abuse it evoked at that
time. At Hampton Court Wren had a very different problem: he was housing
not pensioners but a King and Queen. His original scheme had a quality of
immensity. Our Dutch monarch who had so successfully countered the
statesmanship of Louis XIV. doubtless wanted to follow, at some distance,
his building exploits at Versailles and elsewhere. Queen Mary had a great
liking for the situation of Hampton Court. Wren was bidden to prepare a
scheme for a complete rebuilding and did so. Part of the old fabric was
taken down and Wren’s two great suites of apartments for King and Queen
rose in its place. The work went forward vigorously from 1689 to 1694, and
then the Queen’s death caused the completion of the plan to be abandoned.
The execution of the partial scheme drifted on until 1700. There was a
chance then of the King proceeding to the finishing of the complete plan,
but William’s death finally killed it. To these accidents of mortality we owe
it that part of Wolsey’s palace has remained. If Wren had had his way, not a
brick of the Tudors would have survived. The architect was happy in only
one of his royal clients. Mary was amiable and reasonable, but William’s
temper and his habit of interference tried Wren very high. The King,
however, was fair enough to say that the insufficient headroom of the
cloisters must be ascribed to his express orders which overbore Wren’s
wishes.

Despite this, the Fountain Court is one of the successful features of the
Palace, which reveals Wren’s sanity and dignity and Englishness in a most
convincing way. It is enough to look at Chatsworth, in the light of Hampton
Court, to realize the difference between pedantry and genius. Norman Shaw
so greatly admired Hampton Court, that he would have followed it in
Whitehall, if he had been entrusted with the Government offices. The
weakest part of the Palace is the pedimented garden front, where a sense of
display, due perhaps to Royal Command, contrasts with the greater
simplicity of the return façade towards the Tudor garden.
PLATE X

HAMPTON COURT: WREN’S TWO FRONTS.
Hampton Court, for all its size, is a gentleman’s house rather than a palace,
and Wren’s treatment of the smaller rooms fills a marked place in the
development of the English interior. Left more to himself, Wren would have
been more English in the height of his rooms. He had a sense of fitness
which is of the essence of good architecture. Wren was unlucky at Hampton
Court in more than in one of his clients. His Comptroller (or, as we should
say, Clerk) of the Works was William Talman, who accused him of having

passed bad work. Some masonry showed cracks, and enough stir was
created to lead the House of Lords to order an enquiry. Wren was
exonerated, and with characteristic generosity he did not call, as he might
well have done, for the dismissal of a disloyal assistant. Time has revenged
him. Chatsworth shows Talman to have been a heavy-handed fellow, but he
is also remembered as a bad colleague in other things than the Hampton
Court accusation. If visitors to the Palace should feel that Wren failed in
giving a suitable approach to the State apartments, they should remember
that they are in the presence of an incomplete scheme, and that he left a
design of notable splendour for wings with colonnades at the north side.
The incidental furnishings of avenues took shape in the chestnuts of Bushey
Park, but the rest remained on paper. In one detail of the gardens Wren must
have taken special pleasure. The marvellous iron screens by Tijou have
been moved from their original position, but they remain to show Wren’s
skill in the choice of his craftsmen.
The third of his great secular buildings, Greenwich Hospital, had the same
charitable purpose as Chelsea, but exceeded Hampton Court in
magnificence. Charles I. had employed Inigo Jones to build, at some
distance from the Thames, a house for his Queen, Henrietta Maria. Soon
after the accession of Charles II., John Webb, as ghost for Sir John Denham,
had begun the great building by the shore for which Inigo Jones may have
left designs; but money ran short and work was suspended after only a
small part had been done. This wing is on well-known Palladian lines, but is
hampered by a heavy attic, so ill-adjusted as to discredit whoever was
responsible for it. When William and Mary succeeded James II., the Queen
wished to emulate her uncle Charles in making provision for disabled
seamen as he had done for soldiers. Once more Wren and Evelyn were to be
colleagues. On May 5, 1695, the Royal Commission, consisting of these
two, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other bigwigs, had its first meeting
at the London Guildhall, and sixteen days later the two friends and three
others went, as a Committee, to survey the site. Evelyn’s task was to raise
subscriptions, and he made an interesting choice of a secretary in Mr.
Vanbrugh, afterwards Sir John. About a year was spent in preparing plans,
and on June 4, 1696, the Committee met at Wren’s house in Whitehall to
make agreements for materials and workmen and to give orders for the
foundations to be begun. On the last day of June a select committee of
thirteen dined together at Greenwich, and precisely at five o’clock (Mr.

Flamsteed, the King’s Astronomer, “observing the punctual time by
instruments”) Wren and Evelyn jointly laid the foundation stone.
PLATE XI

GREENWICH HOSPITAL AND ITS TWO DOMES.
Queen Mary wanted the old Queen’s House and the Charles II. wing to be
integral parts of the new scheme—a rather hampering condition. Wren took
the former as the closing feature of a vista from the river, between his two
new blocks named after William and Mary and his Queen Anne block,
which balances and exactly follows the Jones-Webb block of Charles II.
Wren’s contribution to Greenwich was, therefore, the two superb
quadrangular blocks with open sides adorned with colonnades and the big
idea of planning which pulled together the work of four reigns into a
coherent and superb whole. The duality of the domes is a most notable
feature, and their individual design is beautifully differentiated from the
grander scale of St. Paul’s. They are domestic, rather than church-like, in
conception. That Hawksmoor in his capacity as Deputy-Surveyor had a
somewhat free hand in designing part of the work after 1705, that Vanbrugh
succeeded Wren as Surveyor in 1716, that Colin Campbell took up the task
ten years later, and that Ripley superseded him in 1729, does not deprive
Wren of the title of architect of the Hospital. In so far as they departed from
his original designs the buildings suffered, especially from the baldness of

the Campbell elements and the heavy-handedness of the ex-carpenter
Ripley. Wren’s planning, his domes and his colonnades, make Greenwich
the noblest of English public buildings in the Grand Manner.
The view of the Palace from the Thames is magnificent and has been an
inspiration to artists ever since. Abroad, it would be an objective to all
travellers.

CHAPTER X
OTHER BUILDINGS: PUBLIC AND
DOMESTIC
This volume has no claim to be a biography of Wren: still less is it a
catalogue raisonné of his buildings. Familiar students of his work will be
merciful if they find a bare reference, or none, to something they may
regard as peculiarly satisfying and notably Wrennish. I can but plead the
limitations of a little book. But some of his buildings not included in earlier
chapters must be at least mentioned, if shortly and in a disjointed list.
Amongst public works the Monument takes a prominent if rather
unsatisfactory place. The design was subjected to a good deal of
interference, for Hawksmoor records that the flaming urn was substituted as
a crowning feature for the intended statue of Charles contra architecti
intentionem.
Amongst the pedestals of equestrian statues in London, there is none to
compare with that of Charles I. at Charing Cross, which was probably of
Wren’s designing, but it has been attributed also to Grinling Gibbons.
Temple Bar was an interesting archway which now adorns Theobald’s Park
and is commemorated on its old site in Fleet Street by a melancholy
monument. There seems a good case for the return of Temple Bar to some
site in London. The neighbouring entrance to the Middle Temple is one of
Wren’s most charming achievements. His use of brickwork here in
conjunction with a stone base and pilasters is of an ideal modesty and
simplicity, matched within the Temple by the cloister of Hare Court and
rubbed brick doorways in King’s Bench Walk. Of these works as of
Kensington Palace Coventry Patmore’s words were abundantly true: “Sir
Christopher Wren could not build a common brick house without
impressing his own character upon it.” He might have added that it needs a
considerable artist to give character to a common brick house, for the
palette is limited. Wren’s work at Kensington has been a good deal
modified by later hands, but the Queen’s staircase and the Gallery remain
very typical. The exterior suffers greatly from the clumsy additions of

William Kent, which are too often accepted as part of the original house.
The lay-out should be restored, and the great alcove be brought back from
its present stupid position near the fountain. The Orangery is a masterpiece
of simplicity and reserve, and shows Wren exercising the consummate taste
which cannot in honesty be regarded as a continuous characteristic. The
attribution of various houses to Wren rests either upon vague tradition or
upon imaginary internal evidence. The belief that he designed Belton is
persistent but unsupported by documents. The notable contributions made
to its decoration by Grinling Gibbons may have strengthened the tradition.
Certainly Belton is worthy of Wren. The same may be said of two houses in
Chichester, Pallant House and another which has long been called Wren’s
House. Miss Milman in her Life printed a chronological list of works, and
starred those for which there was no documentary authority. But her stars
must be increased. The Chichester houses are cases in point.
It is unfortunate that Marlborough House has been so mishandled since
Wren’s day: the attic storey is a clumsy addition. As he planned it, the
disposition of the rooms showed no advance on the planning of Inigo Jones
and Webb. The main rooms were en suite without any corridor behind them,
a march of convenience which Vanbrugh developed at Blenheim, not
otherwise a mirror of perfection. Sarah, Duchess, must have been a client
calling for all Wren’s skill in handling people. When she quarrelled with
Vanbrugh about his fees for Blenheim, she quoted Wren as a pattern of
moderation “content to be dragged up in a basket, three or four times a
week, to the top of St. Paul’s, and at great hazard, for £200 a year.”
Groombridge Place, Kent, is another house of infinite charm which has
been attributed to Wren. The All Souls Collection of his drawings includes
some sketch elevations of houses. One sheet in particular gives two
alternative treatments for the same plan, but neither is up to Wren’s best
form, and it seems reasonable to assume that the smaller domestic work for
private clients had to be ignored in the main because of his heavy public
employments. Amongst his works which have disappeared altogether are
the Custom House, the Armoury and Mint in the Tower of London (where
his Storehouse has survived), Christ’s Hospital, and the College of
Physicians in Warwick Lane.
Not the least interesting of an architect’s designs are those which are never
carried to full fruition. The most notable of these was a great Palace at

Winchester, begun for Charles II. Not much of it was built, for the King
died before it was finished, and his successors did not like Winchester. The
uncompleted core was later adapted so drastically for use as barracks that it
ceased to have any Wren significance.
The Tomb of Charles I., for which Parliament voted £70,000, was designed
by Wren in 1678. The drawings preserved at All Souls show a domed
structure, which was to have stood at the east end of St. George’s Chapel,
Windsor. Within was to be a statue of the Martyr King standing on a shield
upheld by four allegorical figures. Alternative treatments are shown for this
group in marble and bronze. Grinling Gibbons would no doubt have been
the sculptor, but, as Wren’s title of the drawings notes, it was eheu
conditionem temporum, nondum extructum. The nondum gives a hint that
Wren hoped that it might later be done, but the £70,000 found less worthy
employment. Wren’s careful detailed estimates for the work are printed in
Sir William St. John Hope’s monumental Windsor Castle, with
reproductions of the drawings.

PLATE XII

TRINITY COLLEGE LIBRARY, CAMBRIDGE: RIVER FRONT.
Noble as this design was, I confess I take more pleasure from Wren’s design
for a monument (also in All Souls Library) which Sir Reginald Blomfield
reproduces[C] with the note that it was probably drawn by Grinling
Gibbons. It shows a lady reclining on a couch, not unlike Raggi’s Lady
Cheyne in Chelsea Old Church, but she points with a lively gesture to
cherubs flying above her in a burst of rays and clouds. It shows Wren in his
most baroque mood, and is perhaps his reminiscence of old Bernini’s
monumental manner.
In Scotland he did nothing; but the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, near
Dublin, is attributed to him with some reason. In 1679 he was ordered to
view the site, but no record remains of his visit, and this Irish variant of
Chelsea Hospital is not claimed by his son in the list of works. The building
is simple and dignified with open cloisters round a big quadrangle.
Probably Wren did designs for it and left some assistant or local architect to
supervise its building. The best evidence for his authorship is that there was

no architect in Ireland who could have produced such a design, with the
possible exception of the designer of Beaulieu, near Drogheda.
Another charitable foundation, Morden College, Blackheath, is certainly
Wren’s. It is an enchanting piece of brickwork with a pedimented centre-
piece and lantern.
As Cambridge was the locus of his first completed work of importance,
Pembroke Chapel (the Sheldonian is called in the Parentalia “the first
publick Performance of the Surveyor,” but it was finished later than the
chapel); it also gave him the opportunity for one of his greatest
achievements, the Library of Trinity. His first design was for a circular
building with a domed roof, but this soon gave place to the scheme that was
carried out. A long memorandum by Wren explains his reasons for the
design, which was limited by the need of joining the new Library to the
extension of Neville’s Court, a junction which was not very happily
achieved. The governing consideration of the elevation to the Court was the
maintenance of the Library floor on the same level as the adjoining
chambers. Unfortunately Wren would use two Orders despite the fact that
the structure of the work was in conflict. Evidently he was forcing a design,
naturally of a Palladian type, of a piano nobile on a lower storey which
would be the podium of an Order. It is a case where his ingenuity overbore
his artistic sense, and he resorted to the doubtful expedient of a range of
arches, the tympana of which are filled in solid. The river front has been
criticised on the grounds of an undue austerity, but I find it difficult to
follow this: it is surely a miracle of dignity. For the interior of the Library
there can be nothing but praise. Ideal in dignity and ideal in convenience,
Wren’s book presses have the additional merit of showing Gibbons carving
of peculiar excellence, and he must not be charged with the overcrowding
of the floor by smaller cases needed by modern accessions of books.
Wren was less happy in his chapel and cloister at Emmanuel College. The
breaking of the pediment of the central feature by the lantern turret is not in
his usual vein, but the lantern itself is a very charming composition.
Another related work is the Honywood Library and Cloister at Lincoln
Cathedral, but the Library itself is a rather low and not specially
distinguished apartment.

I bring this slight catalogue of Wren’s miscellaneous works to a close with a
return to Oxford. It is difficult to determine how far he was responsible for
the Library at Queen’s College (1693) because Hawksmoor was mixed up
with him there, but the whole College must be regarded as a Wren building.
There is nothing of Hawksmoor’s more faithful to his old master’s ideas,
and less influenced by Sir John Vanbrugh’s, the two poles between which
the lesser man was always oscillating. Sir Reginald Blomfield is strongly
against attributing the Ashmolean to Wren, but it is difficult to believe that
such a building at such a time could have been entrusted to anyone else.
Similarly Trinity College Chapel (1694) is somewhat of a mystery. It has
been said that Dean Aldrich was the architect and that Wren was only called
in to advise. The quality of the design suggests that Wren was the senior
partner in the combination. There is no confusion with regard to Tom
Tower. Dr. Fell, Dean of Christ Church, commissioned him to build a tower
over Wolsey’s gateway. The result is something certainly not Tudor, but
quite certainly a picturesque composition of a high order. Wren’s detail is
little like that of the sixteenth century below it, but he did the one thing
needful: he provided a dignified and picturesque portal for the College, and
it is folly to rebuke a late seventeenth-century architect for not entering into
the spirit of his predecessors of the early sixteenth. The study of the spirit of
Gothic work, alike systematic and sympathetic, is a growth of less than a
hundred years. Wren was of his age.

CHAPTER XI
WREN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES: LAST
YEARS
The appreciation a man may win in his own day and generation is no sure
guide to his quality as an artist, as witness the cases of Mr. Martin Tupper
and many Past Presidents of the Royal Academy; but when the chorus of
praise persists during something like eighty years and comes from men in
every walk of life, it is at least evidence of notable character. Such praise
was Wren’s in a marked degree, and it helps to explain the way he held his
own under the fickle King Charles, the cantankerous King William, and the
casual Queen Anne. Under King George I., when Wren was a very old man,
he lost his appointment, but only as the culmination of a discreditable
campaign against him by futile people who lacked the wit to appreciate the
greatness of the man against whom they plotted their dishonest little
persecutions.
In so far as Wren’s advancement as an architect may be attributed to any
one man, it is clear that John Evelyn the diarist must have the credit.
Whether he met Wren before 1654 does not appear; but he was in Oxford
on July 11 of that year, Wren being then twenty-two years old, and after
dinner he visited “that miracle of a youth,” and had further dealings with
him two days later, as is noted in an earlier chapter. By 1664, when Wren
showed Evelyn the model of the Sheldonian, he had become “that
incomparable genius,” and Evelyn went to Oxford in 1669 for the
celebrations which marked the completion of the theatre.
Wren’s appointment as Surveyor-General of His Majesty’s Works was due
to Evelyn’s great influence with Charles II., to whom he seems to have
acted in some sort as an architectural adviser.
How greatly Evelyn valued Wren’s judgment in ordinary matters is shown
by a letter in 1665 in which the diarist asks Wren to recommend a tutor for
his boy. In the same letter Evelyn mentions his translation of Fréart’s
Parallels, a book on architecture which had been very successful in France
and sold very largely in England in Evelyn’s edition. The first issue was

dedicated to Sir John Denham, but it is interesting to find that in February,
1696-7, Evelyn wrote to Wren saying that he would dedicate to him the new
edition he was then producing, and so he did with many flourishes.
There is a characteristic outburst in the Diary for May 5, 1681, when Sir W.
Fermor dined with him and Wren: “A wonderful genius had this
incomparable person,” an echo of what he had written seventeen years
before when Wren showed him the model of the Sheldonian—“that
incomparable genius.”
The last Wren entry in the Diary was forty-four years later than the first.
Wren went down to Says Court with “Mr. London, his gardener,” to render
Evelyn the service of estimating the damage done to the house and gardens
during its occupation by Peter the Great, who had comported himself in a
manner which justly disgusted Evelyn. Wren outlived his old and faithful
friend by more than twenty years.

PLATE XIII

THE WADHAM PORTRAIT OF WREN.
An 1825 copy by John Smith of Oxford based on the
Sheldonian portrait, to which Dallaway attached the
unlikely attribution of Thornhill, “painted in
conjunction with Verrio and Kneller.”
Although a quiet, modest, and always overworked person, Wren seems to
have liked social relaxation. He was at Lord Brouncker’s in February, 1666-
7, with Samuel Pepys, who refers to the music that their host had provided.
There were two eunuchs, so tall as to move Sir T. Harvey to some
physiological imaginings, and one woman “very well dressed and
handsome enough, but would not be kissed,” at least so Mr. Killigrew

informed Mr. Pepys. Not long afterwards Pepys met Wren at Streeter’s,
“with several virtuosos,” looking at the paintings which were being made
for the new theatre at Oxford. It must have been a pleasant occasion on
February 9, 1671, when Wren and Pepys dined with Evelyn at Says Court,
and all of them went afterwards to see the “Crucifixion” which Grinling
Gibbons had carved. A few weeks later the King and Queen indicated their
wish to see this work, at Evelyn’s suggestion, and it was taken to Whitehall
for their inspection. Evelyn records the anger he felt at the Queen ignoring
the merits of the wonderful carving because a “French pedling woman” had
run it down, but he had the compensation that “Mr. Wren faithfully
promised me to employ him.” How faithfully that promise was fulfilled is
proved by the choir stalls of St. Paul’s and work at many another Wren
building.
In February, 1676, Evelyn and Wren, with other notable Fellows of the
Royal Society, dined with Sir John Williamson, and in November in the
following year the same inseparable friends dined in the company of Prince
Rupert and other learned men at the Lord Treasurer’s. Wren had achieved
that useful measure of friendship with Prince Rupert which caused his name
to figure on a list of intimates to whom the Prince sent every year a gift of
choicest wine from his estates on the Rhine.
In August, 1680, Evelyn was deputed by the Royal Society to make a visit
of ceremony to Monsieur Chardine, a famous French traveller who had
come to London, and characteristically he took Wren with him.
Wren must have been good company at dinner. In 1669 Sir John Clayton
wrote to a friend: “Saturday last I went with the Duke of Buckingham to
Denham ... on our return home we dined at Uxbridge, and never in all my
life did I pass my day away with such gusto, our company being his Grace,
Mr. Weller, Mr. Surveyor Wren and myself: nothing but quintessence of wit
and most excellent discourse.”
As to whether Wren enjoyed wide hospitalities in his alleged character of
Freemason it is impossible to say, but there is a tradition that he was Grand
Master of a lodge which was intimately associated with St. Paul’s and
became in due time what is known as the Antiquity Lodge. Some
candlesticks, and a mallet bearing an inscription which suggests that it was
used at a St. Paul’s ceremonial, remain in possession of the Antiquity

Lodge. It is necessary, however, to add that Gould in his History of
Freemasonry gives it as his opinion, after careful investigation of the
architect’s connection with the craft, that the evidence points to Wren not
having belonged to a lodge, nor to a society which was not in existence
until 1717, and he goes on to allege that there are three misstatements on
the mallet inscription. I have no knowledge of these matters, but assume
that Gould’s opinion is competent. There is no reference to Freemasonry in
any Wren document or in Parentalia, but so far as the latter is concerned the
omission means nothing.
I have indicated very slightly, and with the diffidence of one who knows
nothing of science but a few of its fairy tales, the large range of Wren’s
scientific labours. It may be that they were curious rather than important,
but it is necessary to set down the considered opinion of Dr. Sprat, the first
historian of the Royal Society. It is a notable tribute:
“In the whole progress of this narration, I have been cautious to
forbear commending the labours of any Private Fellows of the
Society. For this, I need not make any apology to them; feeling
it would have been an inconsiderable honour, to be praised by so
mean a writer: But now I must break this law, in the particular
case of Dr. Christopher Wren: For doing so, I will not alledge
the excuse of my friendship to him; though that perhaps were
sufficient; and it might well be allowed me to take this occasion
of Publishing it: But I only do it on the mere consideration of
justice: For in turning over the Registers of the Society, I
perceived that many excellent things, whose first invention
ought to be ascribed to him, were casually omitted: This moves
me to do him right by himself, and to give this separate account
of his endeavours, in promoting the design of the Royal Society,
in the small time wherein he has had the opportunity of
attending it.”
Dr. Sprat then recites some of Wren’s achievements in the fields of natural
science, astronomy, etc., and continues thus:
“This is a short account of the principal discoveries which Dr.
Wren has presented or suggested to this assembly. I know very
well, that some of them he did only start and design; and that

they have been since carried on to perfection, by the industry of
other hands. I purpose not to rob them of their share in the
honour: Yet it is but reasonable, that the original invention
should be ascribed to the true author, rather than the finishers.
Nor do I fear that this will be thought too much, which I have
said concerning him: For there is a peculiar reverence due to so
much excellence covered with so much modesty. And it is not
flattery but honesty, to give him his just praise; who is so far
from usurping the fame of other men that he endeavours with all
care to conceal his own.”
A man could not ask a better epitaph than “so much excellence covered
with so much modesty.”
It may be that Sprat was carried away by his affection for Wren and
overstated the case, but that amiable reason can hardly apply to all his
contemporaries. Robert Boyle, who had witnessed some of Wren’s
experiments, testified that his knowledge of Wren’s extraordinary sagacity
made him very desirous to try what he proposed.
The evidence of Sir Isaac Newton cannot be ignored. His Preface to the
second edition of the Principia groups Wren with Wallis and Huygens as
“hujus ætatis geometrarum facile principes,” and gives to them the first
credit for a true conception of the laws governing the impacts and reactions
of two bodies in collision. Praise from Newton is praise indeed.
Thomas Hearne carried it a little further. “I heard an eminent mathematician
say that he could mention another equal in mathematics to Sir Isaac
Newton, though he had not published ... Sir Christopher Wren, who was,
indeed, a very extraordinary man.”
When Isaac Barrow succeeded to the Gresham Professorship of Geometry,
he took occasion, in his inaugural oration, to refer to Wren in this fashion:
“One there is, whose name common gratitude forbids me to pass over,
whom I know not whether to admire for his divine genius or for the
sweetness of his disposition ... it will suffice if I name the great and good
Christopher Wren, of whom I will say no more since his merit attracts the
eyes of the whole world” ... and so on, with the inevitable references to
Wren’s modesty.

In nothing did the sweetness of Wren’s nature so clearly appear as in his
relations with Robert Hooke, a sour philosopher and, it would seem, a
disloyal fellow. Hooke was at Westminster just before Wren and ran second
to him all his life. If Elmes’ view of the case be true, Hooke picked up
Wren’s ideas, developed them and tried to take all the credit of them, and
was a bad colleague generally. He quarrelled with Newton, disputed with
Flamsteed, and was snubbed by the Royal Society when he did a design,
unasked, for their home which was promptly rejected and Wren asked to do
it instead. He was always in hot water and incurably unpopular, but Wren
stuck to him. When an assistant was needed in the great labours which
followed the Fire, Wren appointed Hooke to measure and set out the ground
of all the “private street houses,” but was wise enough to keep the Public
Works in his own hands.
Wren was delightfully loyal to the contractors whom he employed. He must
have been on intimate terms with Edward Strong, master mason at St.
Paul’s and elsewhere, for he sent young Christopher abroad in charge of
Strong’s son. He gave the buildings he liked best to the few men he most
trusted. Strong and Christopher Kempster did St. Stephen’s Walbrook;
Strong did the delightful brickwork at St. Benet Paul’s Wharf, St.
Augustine’s, St. Mildred’s, and several others. On the fifty churches only
thirteen joiners and ten plasterers received contracts. All the coppersmith
work, except at two churches, was done by one Robert Bird. My publication
of the accounts of the City churches destroyed all manner of vain fancies as
to the employment of Dutch joiners and Italian plasterers in their building.
When Wren found a good English workman he employed him steadily, and
only went to a foreigner like Tijou for the miraculous ironwork at St. Paul’s,
Hampton Court, and elsewhere when he was a notable artist and far
superior to his English colleagues.

PLATE XIV

THE ST. PAUL’S DEANERY PORTRAIT.
A copy of the Kneller in the National Portrait
Gallery.
As an example of the way Wren was trusted, it is worth noting that when
Flamsteed was bickering by letter with Cassini, the French astronomer, and
accusing Halley of disingenuous practices and praying God to make Halley
sensible of his faults, the peaceful Wren was called in as umpire.
I could wish that some Parliamentary contemporary had put on record his
impressions of Wren as an M.P., an unlikely trade for a man of his
temperament. Elected for New Windsor in William’s first Parliament, he

was unseated on a technicality, but immediately re-elected. In 1700 he was
returned for the Borough of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, but, as Elmes
gravely observes, “notwithstanding this additional occupation, he found
time to write a dissertation on the ascension of the sap in trees, and a paper
on the superfice of the terraqueous globe.” Doubtless he found these
employments prettier relaxations from architecture than attendance at the
House of Commons.
Wren seems to have got on well with Charles II., who knighted him at
Whitehall on November 20, 1672.
Indeed, the King might well have been grateful to the man who so notably
gave lustre to his reign. Wren stood to Charles in something the same
relation as Phidias to Pericles.
King William was an awkward client, and interfered with Wren in the
design of Hampton Court; but Queen Mary liked to talk to him about
architecture and gardening, and to watch the progress of the works “on
which she often offered her own judgment, which was allowed to be
exquisite.” For Wren’s sake, we hope it was.
Queen Anne was invoked by Wren to take a hand in his quarrels with the
Commissioners of St. Paul’s. He had a shrewd dig at them in one formal
petition to Her Majesty, in which he was able to show that they were
making a mess of the railings round her own statue, and throwing over
Tijou’s design, as approved by Wren, in favour of some model of their own.
What action Anne took does not appear, but then or at some time she gave
Wren a delightful chest of drawers, which remained an heirloom in the
Wren family until Mrs. Pigott’s death, and a calendar watch that reposes in
Sir John Soane’s Museum with a walking-stick, which conceals drawing
instruments.
I have dealt with Wren’s dismissal from office in the chapter on St. Paul’s.
He was then in the eighty-sixth year of his age and the forty-ninth of his
Surveyorship. The remainder of his life was spent in retirement, “in which
Recess, free from worldly affairs, he passed the greatest part of the five last
following years of his life in contemplation and studies and principally in
the consolation of the holy scriptures: cheerful in solitude and as well
pleased to die in the shade as in the light.”

The manner of Wren’s passing is told by Miss Phillimore, and is, I imagine,
a family tradition derived from Mrs. Pigott:
“Once a year it was his habit to be driven to London, and to sit
for a while under the dome of his own Cathedral. On one of
these journeys he caught a cold and soon afterwards, on
February 25, 1723, his servant, thinking Sir Christopher slept
longer after dinner than was his wont, came into the room and
found his master dead in his chair, with an expression of perfect
peace on the calm features.”
So died a great artist, a great Christian, and a great gentleman, who lived, as
his epitaph says, more than ninety years, not for himself, but for the good of
the State.

CHAPTER XII
THE PROFESSIONAL MAN
It is of some interest to attempt to form a picture of Wren, not as a great
artist in building, but as a professional architect dealing with clients who
were often awkward and sometimes dishonest, like the St. Paul’s authorities
in his later years, carrying out a vast amount of detail work which is now
regarded as the task of the surveyor rather than the architect, making
arrangements for the settlement of disputes, boundary lines, frontages, and
for compliance with Royal Proclamations and Acts of Parliament,
negotiating with clients as to fees, and generally dealing with the financial
and business side of his profession.
All his biographers have emphasised the undoubted fact that Wren was not
a self-seeking man, but I think they have a little overdone the suggestion of
altruism. It is said in Parentalia and elsewhere that Wren’s salary of £200 a
year for the work of designing and superintending St. Paul’s was a very
modest sum. That is true, but it must be remembered that the salary ran
from 1675, when he was appointed Surveyor-General and Architect of St.
Paul’s, until 1711, when the House of Commons determined that the
Cathedral was completed. He, therefore received £7,200 in respect of St.
Paul’s. It is also stated in Parentalia that he received £100 a year for work
on the City churches. But this seems to be wholly untrue, for Wren was paid
on exactly the same basis as an architect of to-day—i.e., by a commission
on the value of the work executed. Until 1919, when it was raised to 6 per
cent., the customary remuneration of an architect in England was 5 per
cent.; and a manuscript account, covering the period from July, 1670, to
March, 1673, quoted by Wyatt Papworth, shows that twelve-pence in the
pound for all monies received and paid was disbursed “for allowances for
rebuilding the Churches to the Officers of Works for the management of the
whole.” This is 5 per cent., out of which Wren no doubt paid for his office
staff. As the total expenditure on the City churches was £263,786, Wren
must have received over £13,000. In addition, the City authorities would
now and again give to him (or in one case to Lady Wren) a lump sum by
way of expressing their gratitude for his services.

In the capacity of Surveyor-General of His Majesty’s Works, he was
receiving, in 1675, 13s. 2d. a day and “availes” of £80 per quarter, which
meant another £320 a year, by way of retaining fee; and Papworth
presumes, I think with reason, that he also received specific payment in
respect of each service performed. By the year 1715, his salary and “riding
charges” had dropped to £136 a year, but it is also to be remembered that all
this time he had an official residence in Whitehall consisting of sixteen
rooms and a cellar, which he occupied for about fifty years without cost to
himself.
In respect of Chelsea Hospital he received a fee of £1,000, but there are
many examples of his refusing payment altogether. He insisted on doing all
the work at Greenwich Hospital without payment, saying, “Let me have
some share in an act of charity and mercy.” When he came to design the
Library of Trinity at Cambridge, for which the Master had some difficulty
in getting enough subscriptions, Wren’s contribution was the value of his
own work, for which he made no charge; and, similarly, he received nothing
in respect of his work at St. Clement Danes. These are acts of generosity of
which we happen to have definite record, and I do not doubt that there were
many other examples of the same sort not recorded, for Wren’s generosity
was equalled only by his modesty.
He was not above a trifling piece of nepotism; for his son Christopher
became Deputy Clerk Engrosser in the Office of Works in 1694 and Clerk
of Works in 1702, succeeding Dickenson. This appointment was confirmed
by George I. in 1715. But when Sir Christopher fell from favour his son was
also dismissed, and from the younger Christopher’s casual proceedings in
the compilation of the material of Parentalia, I cannot believe that the State
suffered greatly from his disappearance.
During thirty-two years of Wren’s professional career, Nicholas
Hawksmoor was his domestic clerk, which we may take to mean that he
was in charge of Wren’s office and his right-hand man, both in designing
and in the financial supervision of the works. It would appear that he
performed a good many of the duties which now fall to the separate
profession of quantity surveyor. I suspect that, for example, the payments to
the various contractors for the City churches, and possibly also for St.
Paul’s, were certified by Wren after the value of the work done had been
examined by Hawksmoor. It seems certain that the very elaborate accounts

of the City churches, with which I have dealt fully in Archæologia, were
actually written out by Hawksmoor himself.
PLATE XV

THE CENTRAL PORTION OF THE
CHIAROSCURO ENGRAVING BY ELISHA
KIRKALL, AFTER KLOSTERMAN.
By Wren’s time, the practice of architecture had been organised generally
on lines which were developed notably by the brothers Adam, very
competent business men, and have been elaborated in very modern times.
But substantially the methods remain the same except that contracting has
equally been developed so that separate tradesmen are now merged in a

general contractor in England. In Scotland Wren’s way still prevails to a
large extent. There was nothing slapdash about Wren’s methods: everything
was recorded in the most orderly and detailed manner. If materials delivered
to St. Paul’s were for any reason transferred to one of the City churches,
most careful entry was made in the accounts of the quantities and values,
and the necessary debits and credits were taken into account when the
contractors’ bills were settled. Wren was as efficient in business details as
he was in design.
If my memory does not deceive me (and some thieving friend has made it
impossible for me to verify my reference), it was Mr. G. K. Chesterton, in
Biography for Beginners, who made moving comment on an imaginative
picture of Wren in the act of being helped into a fur coat by an obsequious
flunkey, as follows:
Sir Christopher Wren
Went to dine with some men.
“If any body calls
Say I’m designing St. Paul’s.”
Perhaps the major part of his long life of work was taken up by far less
attractive tasks, for he was His Majesty’s Office of Works and His
Majesty’s Office of Woods and Forests of his day rolled into one. The Privy
Council called on him for reports on questions of all kinds. Elmes ploughed
through a manuscript book of the Council’s transactions on almost every
page of which Wren’s name appears. One Mr. Berkehead wanted to build a
house and brew-house at Knightsbridge. Was this in contravention of His
Majesty’s proclamation? No, it was too far out of town, and Mr. Berkehead
may proceed. May Mr. Sleymaker build on an old foundation in Brick
Lane? He gets his permission. Sir Richard Stydolfe had improperly started
building at the rear of St. Giles’s Church leading from thence to Piccadilly.
May he go on? The Surveyor-General goes off to St. Giles’s, examines the
whole matter and reports that he should be so licensed “provided the said
Sir Richard Stydolfe build regularly, according to direction and according to
a design to which his said licence may refer; that he be obliged to build with
brick, with party walls, with sufficient scantlings, good paving in the
streets, and sufficient sewers and conveyances for the water ...” and so forth
and so on. The Colonel Panton who gave his name to Panton Street was in
similar trouble, but Wren found that the Colonel’s building scheme would

“cure the noysomeness of the place” and “the design of the building shewn
to me may be very usefull to the publique.” Wren was constructive in
everything he did, and did not merely deal with the current business that
was referred to him. Some builders in Soe Hoe “(surely a pleasanter
spelling than Soho)” were building small and mean habitations,
“receptacles for the poorer sort and the offensive trades” and rendering the
government of these parts more unmanageable. His Majesty’s Sergeant
Plumber was much upset about the manifest decay of the waters in the
expenseful drains and conduits of Whitehall Palace which resulted from
these nefarious proceedings in Soe Hoe, and Wren supported him with a
petition. Soe Hoe had gone too far. His Majesty in person, His Majesty’s
royal brother and Prince Rupert, and the Archbishop of Canterbury and
others in full council, looked into the matter, met more than once about it.
Wren was ordered to see that obedience be given to His Majesty’s
proclamation: failing which, he was to imprison the workmen for contempt.
Lord Rochester asks him to examine the bills for repairing the Royal
stables, and Wren goes through them and finds “the particular prices very
reasonable, one thing with another.”
But sometimes Wren must have been bored. Finding lodgings for Mr.
Ronchi at St. James’s was hardly a task for the creator of St. Paul’s, but he
found them. In 1679 he was in professional touch with the troubles that
followed the finding of Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey dead in a ditch. Papists’
plots were in the air. The Spanish Ambassador became highly unpopular,
and the Lords’ Committee appointed to look into “the late horrid
conspiracy” ordered Sir Christopher Wren and Edward Warcup, Esq., to put
padlocks on all such doors as open out of Mr. Weld’s house into the
Ambassador’s house.
So “we repaired to Wild-house and having viewed the dores ... we affixed
padlocks ...” and much more to the same effect, “all which we humbly
submit.” I am glad to add that His Excellency showed great civility to Wren
in the character of locksmith. In all these proceedings, as Elmes justly
remarks, “the honour, integrity and public spirit of Wren appear
transcendent.”
I must add a word about Wren as a draughtsman. The drawings which can
with certainty be attributed to his own hand show him to have been a

competent but not a good performer. A man so immersed in multifarious
work had no time for the niceties of the drawing-board, and it is probable
that his details were drawn roughly in the shops of his contractors or “on
the job,” as the work progressed. The idea was complete in his own mind,
and with workmen used to his words and wishes verbal instructions on his
frequent visits would forward the work without the elaborated drawings and
details of a modern contract. Differences were adjusted by the simple
methods of trade measurement in use. But that he attached great importance
to drawing as an element in a liberal education is shown by a reference in
Christ’s Hospital Committee Book, and it is delightful to find here once
more the association of Wren and Pepys.
“At a committee of the Schooles in Christ’s Hospitall, the 30th November,
1692, ... Mr. Treasurer acquainted the committee that he had two letters one
from Sir Christo. Wren and the other from Esq. Pepys declaring their
opinions concerning the introducing the art of drawing among the Boyes.”
Wren’s letter, which Mr. Nathaniel Hawes read aloud to the Committee, is
as follows:
“Nov. 24th, 1692.
“Sir,
“... It was observed by somebody there present [at his house]
that our English Artists are dull enough at invention but when
once a foreigne patterne is sett they imitate soe well that
commonly they exceed the Originall, I confess the observation
is generally true, but this showes that our natives want not a
Genius but education in that wch is the foundation of all
Mechanick Arts, a practice in designing or drawing, to wch
everybody in Italy, France and the Low Countries pretends more
or less. I cannot imagine that next to good writing anything
could be more usefully taught your children especially such as
will naturally take to it, and many such you will find amongst
your Numbers who will have a naturall genius to it, which it is a
pity should be stifled.... It is not Painters, Sculptors, Gravers,
only that will find an advantage in such Boyes, but many other
Artificers too long to enumerate. Noe Art but will be mended

and improved; by which not only your Charity of the House will
be enlarged but the Nation advantaged....
“Your affectionate friend and humble servant,
“Chr. Wren.”
This is a strong plea for the teaching of drawing in schools, but there is, as
always, the same practical comment. Draughtsmanship is of value as the
foundation of the “mechanick arts,” but it comes next to “good writing.”

CHAPTER XIII
STUDENT AND SCHOLAR
Before attempting some sketch of Wren’s position in the world of English
Architecture, in which will be set down his own outlook on his art, mainly
in his own words, it seems reasonable to describe his attitude towards the
past and the views of others. The liveliness and modernity of his mind did
not blind him to the lessons of antiquity, and his essays in the “restoration”
of classical buildings show him to have been an earnest antiquary. Criticism
of his conclusions must carry with it the remembrance that the apparatus
criticus was exceedingly limited in his day, when the book was everything.
The spade had not yet revealed a superior authority and opened out a vast
prospect of boundless antiquity and tradition.
One of the most interesting features of the interleaved documents in the
heirloom Parentalia is the sketch of Wren’s conjectural restoration of the
Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.[D] The last note of the printed Parentalia is
headed, “Of the Sepulchre of Mausolus, King of Caria.” It ends with the
words, “The plate of the above is omitted, on account of the drawing being
imperfect.”
This imperfect drawing is pasted on the last page of the Discourse in the
heirloom copy, and shows Wren to be less careful as an archæologist than
might have been anticipated. “The Sepulchre,” he writes, “is so well
described by Pliny that I have attempted to design it accordingly, and also
very open, conformable to the Description in Martial, Aere vacuo Pendentia
Mausolea, and yet it wanted not the solidity of the Dorick order;” and he
goes on to say, on very insufficient grounds, “I conclude this work must be
the exactest Form of the Dorick.”
The odd thing is that Wren had not noticed the statement of Vitruvius that
Pythios, the architect of the Mausoleum and the sculptor of the chariot
group, gave up the Doric order because of the incongruous arrangements
which arose in its use. Wren’s great blunder, however, was in the
misreading of one word in Pliny’s description, “Pteron.” He says it is an
unusual term. Russell Sturgis gives its meaning as “that which forms a side

or flank, as the row of columns along the side of a temple, or the side wall
itself.” It is the more odd that Wren boggled over the word Pteron, seeing
that he used the word Dipteron in his description of the Temple of Diana at
Ephesus. At Ephesus there was no question in his mind of an “Attick order
rising above the cornice,” but he takes the Pteron at Halicarnassus to have
that meaning, and to be “a word of Greek Authors of Architecture now
lost.” Anyhow, it pleasantly exemplifies on how insubstantial a foundation
can rest a piece of architectural criticism which is based on literary
evidence alone.
His mistake naturally vitiates the whole restoration, apart from the fact that
the Mausoleum was of the Ionic order.
The consideration of Wren’s restoration will send the student to Professor
Lethaby’s illuminating monographs on “Greek Buildings represented by
fragments in the British Museum.” They must make him realise again, and
more sensitively, the importance of going to the stones, and setting aside
even Pliny (or, perhaps, especially Pliny) if he does not confirm their
evidence.
On the wall of the Mausoleum Room at the British Museum is a drawing
lettered “Design by Sir C. Wren from Pliny’s description of the Tomb of
Mausolus, copied from Wren’s book, the Parentalia,” and signed “J. E.
Goodchild, 1893.” Goodchild was a pupil of Cockerell, who also made a
restoration represented at the British Museum both by a drawing and a
model. In the MS. of the Parentalia at the Royal Society is a sheet with a
rough sketch-plan, doubtless from Wren’s hand. From it and from Wren’s
description, Goodchild presumably made his drawing. The sketch elevation
in the heirloom copy gives an infinitely better-proportioned and more
reasonable building than Goodchild’s. There is the possibility that the
imperfect drawing referred to in the Parentalia is the sketch-plan bound up
with the MS., but I feel sure the elevation in the heirloom copy is indicated.
Goodchild’s description on the drawing suggests that he had merely copied
from the Parentalia. It would have been more correct had he said “based on
indications in the Parentalia.”
A word may be added about Wren’s description (printed in the Parentalia)
of the Artemision at Ephesus. There are bound, in the ordinary copies of the

book, engravings of a plan and elevation of the Temple, and also a plan and
elevation of Wren’s conjectural restoration of the shrine of the goddess.
The odd feature of this restoration is again Wren’s reliance on Pliny’s
figures, which would have made what Professor Lethaby calls a temple of
“enormous and impossible size.” In order to fit in Pliny’s 127 columns,
Wren has to make the fronts decastyle. To absorb the odd number of
columns he invents a quite enchanting shrine which has small claim to
credibility, and rather recalls the garden temples of the eighteenth century.
He again neglects the safer guidance of Vitruvius, who states that the
temple was octastyle. His observations on the Temple of Peace built by
Vespasian include some charming phrases: “Each Deity had a peculiar
Gesture, Face, and Dress hieroglyphically proper to it; as then Stories were
but Morals involved: and not only their Altars and Sacrifices were mystical,
but the very Forms of their Temples. No Language, no Poetry can so
describe Peace, and the Effects of it in Men’s Minds, as the Design of the
Temple naturally paints it, without any affectation of the Allegory. It is easy
of Access, and open, carries an humble Front, but embraces wide, is
luminous and pleasant, and content with an internal Greatness, despises an
invidious Appearance of all that Heighth it might otherwise justly boast of,
but rather fortifying itself on every Side, rests secure on a Square and ample
Basis.”
But devotion to the antiquities of Greece did not hinder Wren from digging
deeply into the history of Roman Britain, and his conclusions as to the
London of the Romans are quoted with respect by the archæologists of to-
day.
Amongst the criticisms directed against Wren as an antiquary are those
which are concerned with his Gothic exercises. One otherwise devout
admirer says of St. Dunstan-in-the-East, St. Mary’s, Aldermary, and St.
Michael’s, Cornhill: “Whether Wren made these designs under pressure, or
merely as academical exercises for the entertainment of his friends is
unknown, but it is very evident that he had not the least sympathy with
Gothic architecture, or taken any trouble to master its most rudimentary
features.” Without going into the reasons for these Gothic adventures
beyond dismissing the idea that Wren made such solid entertainment for his
friends, it is at least safe to reply that Wren understood the nature of Gothic
very well. That is not to say that he could reproduce it, but the informed

student of any phase of art is not necessarily the person to create it. In 1669
he made a survey of Salisbury Cathedral for his old friend Bishop Seth
Ward, and wrote a report which shows a true critical appreciation of the
problems of the mediæval architect, of where he failed but also of where he
succeeded. There is none of the contemptuous violence used by the virtuous
Evelyn when he refers to Gothic, which led the way for Ruskin’s later
vehemence about the “foul torrent of the Renaissance.” Wren merely
remarks, “This Form of Churches has been rejected by modern Architects
abroad, who use the better and Roman Art of Architecture,” and commends
the proportions of the nave and aisles: “The Mouldings are decently mixed
with large Planes, without an Affectation of filling every Corner with
Ornaments, ... the Architect trusted to a stately and rich plainness.” Wren’s
criticisms are directed to the foundations, the low level of the floor, the
insufficient size of the pillars, and the bracing of the walls with iron. He
also objected, with some justice, to the poise of the aisle vaulting, supported
from without by buttresses but not within save by the pillars themselves.
It happened that Wren had to concern himself intimately with other
“congestions of heavy dark melancholy and monkish piles, without any just
proportion, use or beauty” (the phrase is Evelyn’s), such as Westminster
Abbey. For twenty-five years he was Surveyor to the Abbey, and wrote a
Report on it in 1713. We may pass over his historical paragraphs, which
show shrewdness of observation, for his obiter dicta on Gothic methods. He
disliked the “flutter of archbuttresses,” as they “occasion the Ruin of
Cathedrals, being so much exposed to the Air and Weather,” but is tolerant
of Henry VII.’s Chapel, “a nice embroidered Work.”
We have learnt by dire experience the heavy burden of repairs incident to
the mediæval system of external supports by flying arches, pinnacles, and
buttresses in our climate. He goes on to specify necessary repairs, some
done, and others needed, and to plead for the finishing of the West Front
and the completion of the Central Tower with the addition of a spire, which
“will give a proper Grace to the whole Fabrick, and the West End of the
City, which seems to want it.”
Sir Charles Barry was later to be equally concerned with the idea of
completing the outline of the Abbey, as his last designs show.

Wren’s common sense and real respect for Gothic are alike shown by his
proposal for the spire: “I have made a Design, which will not be very
expensive but light, and still in the Gothic form, and of a Style with the rest
of the Structure, which I would strictly adhere to, throughout the whole
Intention: to deviate from the old Form would be to run into a disagreeable
Mixture: which no Person of a good Taste could relish.”
He went on to talk of the north window, then stopped with plaster to prevent
its total ruin, and said his models for the new work were “such as I conceive
may agree with the original scheme of the old Architect, without any
modern mixtures to shew my own Inventions.” His North Transept Front
was swept away by Pearson, not to everyone’s satisfaction, and though the
Gothic grammar of it was inevitably at fault, because he was trying to do
something against the current of the times, the failure was not due to any
lack of appreciation of Gothic. The existing western towers were not built
in Wren’s lifetime and he need not be charged with the defects of their
execution by the introduction of definitely classical cornices and other
details of a type which Wren would not have used. So much for Wren as a
student of Gothic. I come now to an example of the use he made of other
men’s writings.
In the library of Shirburn Castle there is a copy of Wotton’s Elements of
Architecture, first edition, 1624, annotated by the hand of Sir Christopher
himself. It is worth while quoting from these notes in some detail, because
they show that Wren was a careful reader and that he was quick to mark
every kind of practical application of what he read. The page references are
to the first edition of the Elements.
Where Wotton says of staircases (on p. 58) that “the breadth of every single
step should never be less than one foot, nor more than eighteen inches,”
Wren adds “nor so much as eighteen inches at any time, for if a step exceed
twelve, those who have but short [legs] must tread twice upon the same
step, especially in descent, which, to women especially, is troublesome, and
dangerous to the hasty.” James Wyatt, in the circular staircase of
Devonshire House, erred in this way, with exactly the effect that Wren
describes. One bears in mind in this connection that Wren himself was of
short stature. On p. 55 Wotton discourses of the advantage of luminous
rooms: “Indeed, I must confess that a frank light can misbecome no edifice
whatsoever, temples only excepted, which were anciently dark, as they are

likewise at this day in some proportion, devotion more requiring collected
than defused spirits,” on which Wren makes the comment that Christ
Church in London was practically nothing but window, and was fitter for a
stage than for a church, “although for the kind of building it is a thorough
piece of work.” On gardens and their treatment with aqueducts, walks, etc.,
Wren makes the note, “And for disposing the current of a river to a mighty
length in a little space I invented the Serpentine, a form admirably
convoying the current in circular and yet contrary motions upon one and the
same level, with walks and retirements between to the advantage of all
purposes, either of gardenings, plantings, or banquetings ... far beyond the
bungarly [!] invention at Hatfield so much liked for pleasure.” Up and down
the book there are scattered all manner of other interesting notes. There is a
practical thought in Wren’s reference to the very small chimneys in use in
Spain, where charcoal was sold by weight. He has evidently had difficulty
with smoky chimneys, for to Wotton’s observation, “Then there is a
repulsion of the fume by some higher hill or fabrique that shall overtop the
chimney,” he makes the significant comment, “As in our buildings here.”
In connection with terracing any story (by which Wotton seems to have
meant the making of loggias), Wren remarks: “Terracing is most
commended in hotter climates, and in our country must serve mostly for
summer rooms.” To Wotton’s general reflection that “various colours on the
out-walls of buildings have always in them more delight than dignity,”
Wren adds the criticism in Latin that in this particular the noble building of
Lord Exeter at Wimbledon also offends. He seems, however, to have been
friendly to the use of mosaic, for he says: “Herein excels that excellent cave
at Bodington wherein stands the brazen hydra with seven springs out of
seven heads.” With regard to the art of the plasterer, Wotton had said:
“Plastique is not only under sculpture, but indeed very sculpture itself, with
this difference that the plasterer doth make his figures by addition, and the
carver by subtraction.” Wren makes short work of this with, “This
proposition can never hold true to the name of sculpture.”
At the end of the Elements Wotton promises another work, “A Philosophical
Survey of Education, which is indeed a Second Building or Repairing of
Nature, and, as I may term it, a kind of moral architecture.” Wren must have
taken considerable pleasure from the Elements, for in the margin he has
written: “Oh that we might see that, so long expected.”

There are bits of detailed criticism in his first Tract which might have been
used in recent comments on a great London building: “Fronts ought to be
elevated in the Middle, not the Corners; because the Middle is the place of
greatest Dignity and first arrests the Eye; and rather projecting forward in
the Middle, than hollow. For these Reasons, Pavilions at the Corners are
naught; because they make both Faults, a hollow and depressed Front.... No
Roof can have Dignity enough to appear above a Cornice, but the Circular:
in private Buildings it is excusable.”
We know little about the amount of Wren’s general reading, but he was
certainly a student of Elyot’s Governour. Some years ago I was the means
of placing in the R.I.B.A. Library the 1546 edition of this once famous but
now almost forgotten book. Its chief interest lies in the fact that it bears the
autographs on the title-page of Sir Christopher’s father, Dean Christopher
Wren, and of Sir Christopher himself. The other writings scribbled on the
margins are the work of much earlier owners of the volume, which was
nearly a century old when the Dean acquired it. There is some little
evidence that the architect studied the book with care. Sir Thomas Elyot
was concerned to set out the whole behaviour of a knightly gentleman, and
among other things gives some warnings against the use of oaths. When Sir
Christopher was building St. Paul’s Cathedral he was distressed by the
profanity of the workmen, and posted up a notice directed against bad
language. It is possible that he consulted the Governour before drafting this
notice, for the page references in the index under the heading “othes” has
been corrected from 170 to 160, and this was possibly done by Wren when
he sought for what Elyot had to say about oaths.

CHAPTER XIV
“THE ARCHITECT OF ADVENTURE”
In trying to estimate with any precision what is Wren’s position in the
history of British Architecture, the immediate and obvious comparison is
with Inigo Jones. I refer to Wren in my Preface as our architect of greatest
achievement, because I hesitate to use the simpler words—our greatest
architect. In my own mind the latter is a true description, but the enthusiasts
for Inigo Jones would dispute it. None, however, can cavil at the statement
that Wren achieved more than any other English architect, whatever nice
distinctions may be drawn as to the relative greatness of his art and that of
Inigo Jones. The two men are not strictly comparable, and represent in their
work and outlook two different currents in the history of architecture. Inigo
Jones was essentially academic and, in his relationship to the traditional
methods of building which he found, the forerunner of the modern
professional architect. He had trained himself by much foreign travel and
by close study of the facts of building before he embarked on his career.
Wren, on the other hand, was essentially an amateur, if the word be
understood in its most favourable sense and not in the least contemptuously.
Inigo Jones was not an inventor. He took the Palladio tradition as his model
and adhered to it with faithfulness. Wren does not seem to have had any
particular hero amongst the great Italian architects. He kept throughout his
career a free mind, open to the suggestions of his own inventiveness, ready
to accept existing conditions, rather than academic rules, as the guides to
his treatment of a problem, and eager to try new structural ideas.
It must plainly be said that Wren suffered frequent lapses of taste, and it
does no service to his great memory to gloss over these faults. As a result of
them it happened that practically no work of Wren, however noble in its
conception, however magnificent its solution of difficult problems, can be
freed from criticism in detail. He did not produce the complete unity against
which no criticism can lie. Of Inigo Jones at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden (as it
was before it was rebuilt), and again at the Banqueting Hall, of Robert
Adam in the hall at Syon, and of Sir Charles Barry at the Reform Club, it
can be said that they made no mistakes. Each achievement is complete and

perfect in its kind. But it is impossible to say that even of St. Paul’s
Cathedral: there are elements in its design which are weak and confused.
Even in the steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow, which is very nearly perfect, the
diameter of the cylinder enclosed by the ring of columns is hardly right.
This sort of criticism is even more true of the majority of the City churches.
The cause for this lack of perfection is not difficult to find. Wren was an
amateur, not only by the cast of his mind, but by the circumstances of his
entry into architecture: he was imperfectly trained for his work.

ST MARY-LE-BOW
If he had followed the example of Inigo Jones and studied the Italian
Renaissance on the spot, not only in respect of design, but also of the facts
of building, he would have avoided many pitfalls. Great as is the part which
the knowledge of mathematics and geometry plays in his art, nothing did

and nothing could take the place of the practical knowledge of the art of
building which Jones possessed and Wren lacked, at least until his later
years.
It is possible, for example, that the present trouble at St. Paul’s Cathedral
would have been avoided if Wren, whose whole admiration was for the
Roman manner of building, had gone to Rome to see what, in fact, Roman
building was. He would then have learnt that Roman builders did not carry
immense weights on piers which consisted, as at St. Paul’s, of a core of
rubble cased in by finely jointed ashlar. He would have found that it was
advisable to build them either of ashlar throughout, or, if he had decided on
a rubble core with an ashlar casing, to interrupt the rubble core at
reasonable intervals by courses of hard tiles or bricks. These would have
prevented the perpendicular settlement of the rubble that has now disturbed
the relation between the rubble and the ashlar casing. The professional Inigo
Jones would not have made that mistake. The amateur Wren did. And there
is little excuse for this fault. In his Report on St. Paul’s, written before the
Fire, Wren is very contemptuous of his Gothic predecessor: “The work was
both ill design’d and ill built from the Beginning: ill design’d, because the
Architect gave not Butment enough to counterpoise and resist the weight of
the Roof from spreading the Walls; for the Eye alone will discover to any
man that those Pillars, as vast as they are, even eleven Foot diameter, are
bent outwards at least six inches from their first position. This bending of
the Pillars was facilitated by their ill Building, for they are only cased
without, and that with small stones, not one greater than a Man’s Burden;
but within it is nothing but a Core of small Rubbish-stone, and much
mortar, which easily crushes and yields to the weight.” When the time came
for Wren to build the piers that carry his dome, he fell into exactly the same
blunder.
He was similarly defeated sometimes by problems of design for lack of
knowledge of the history of his art, and by too great a reliance on his own
invention. In trying at St. Paul’s to marry the idea of a great central dome to
the Gothic cruciform plan with a determination to preserve the long vista
down the aisles, he involved himself in difficulties in the support of the
dome which he could not safely overcome without clumsy elements of
design, to be discussed later.

PLATE XVI

WREN MEDAL AT WADHAM COLLEGE.
Cast and chased about 1783 by G. D. Gaale.
Yet, in spite of all his technical ignorance, he succeeded because of the
essential greatness of his mind. In succeeding, he carried architecture
forward, not by a normal development, but by leaps and bounds, so far
indeed, that there was found no one to follow him in that line of
development. Hawksmoor was an exceedingly capable architect who had
benefited, so far as his capacity would allow, by thirty-two years of close
association with the master; but, as Sir Reginald Blomfield has said, he was
always trying to interpret Vanbrugh in terms of Wren. While he was under
the influence of Wren he designed like Wren, when he came under the
influence of Vanbrugh he designed like Vanbrugh.
Of Wren’s own outlook on his art we fortunately possess illuminating notes,
not only in his printed Tracts, but in a MS. bound up with the heirloom
Parentalia. It was printed by Miss Phillimore, and forms the text of
Professor Lethaby’s enchanting essay on “The Architecture of
Adventure,”[E] from which I have borrowed the heading of this chapter—an
acknowledgment, trivial though it be, of the debt I owe to its author.
Wren’s paper is no more than a fragment, but it is a noble fragment and
begins thus:

“Whatever a man’s sentiments are upon mature deliberation, it
will still be necessary for him in a conspicuous Work to preserve
his Undertaking from general censure, and so for him to
accommodate his Designs to the gust of the Age he lives in, tho’
it appears to him less rational. I have found no little difficulty to
bring Persons, of otherwise a good genius, to think anything in
Architecture would be better than what they had heard
commended by others, and what they had view’d themselves.
Many good Gothick forms of Cathedrals were to be seen in our
Country, and many had been seen abroad, which they liked the
better for being not much different from ours in England: this
humour with many is not yet eradicated, and, therefore, I judge
it not improper to endeavour to reform the Generality to a truer
taste in Architecture by giving a larger Idea of the whole Art,
beginning with the reasons and progress of it, from the most
remote Antiquity; and that in short touching chiefly on some
things which have not been remarked by others. The Project of
Building is as natural to Mankind as to Birds; and was practised
before the Flood.”
And then Wren goes off into musings on the construction of the Ark, the
Tower of Babel, the Pyramids, and the Sepulchre of Porsenna as described
by Pliny, finishing with this luminous phrase:
“I have been the longer in this Description, because the Fabrick
was in the Age of Pythagoras and his School, when the World
began to be fond of Geometry and Arithmetick.”
This was the core of Wren’s claim as an architect, the reliance upon
scientific rather than traditional elements in design. He develops the idea in
his first Tract printed in Parentalia:
“Beauty is a Harmony of Objects, begetting Pleasure by the Eye.
There are two Causes of Beauty—natural and customary.
Natural is from Geometry, consisting in Uniformity (that is
equality) and Proportion. Customary Beauty is begotten by the
Use of our Senses to those Objects which are usually pleasing to
us for other Causes, as Familiarity or particular Inclination
breeds a Love to Things not in themselves lovely. Here lies the

great Occasion of Errors, here is tried the Architects Judgment,
but always the true Test is natural or geometrical Beauty.
Geometrical Figures are naturally more beautiful than other
irregular; in this all consent as to a Law of Nature. Of
geometrical Figures, the Square and the Circle are most
beautiful; next the Parallelogram and the Oval. Straight Lines
are more beautiful than Curve.... There are only two beautiful
Positions of strait Lines, perpendicular and horizontal; this is
from Nature and consequently Necessity, no other than upright
being firm.”
Wren’s acute judgment noted the great part played by such factors as
historical association, one of the “other causes,” in the public appreciation
of architecture.
Earlier in the Tract he makes obeisance to the three principles which had
been laid down by earlier writers, but with a characteristic rider:
“Beauty, Firmness and Convenience are the Principles: the two
first depend upon geometrical Reasons of Opticks and Staticks;
the third only makes the Variety.”
Scholarly though Wren was in his art, he took nothing for granted, but
examined the common-places with a desire to establish reasons for them or
reject them:
“Modern authors who have treated of Architecture seem
generally to have little more in view, but to set down the
Proportions of Columns, Architraves and Cornices in the several
Orders, as they are distinguished into Dorick, Ionick,
Corinthian, and Composite, and in these Proportions finding
them in the ancient Fabricks of the Greeks and Romans (though
more arbitrarily used than they care to acknowledge) they have
reduced them into Rules, too strict and pedantick, and so as not
to be transgressed, without the Crime of Barbarity, though in
their own Nature they are but the Modes and Fashions of those
ages wherein they were used.”
There is a very modern ring about the following moralising:

“Although Architecture contains many excellent Parts, besides
the ranging of Pillars, yet Curiosity may lead us to consider
whence this Affectation arose originally, so as to judge nothing
beautiful but what was adorned with Columns, even where there
was no real use of them.... It will be to the purpose, therefore, to
examine whence proceeded this Affectation of a Mode which
hath continued now at least 3,000 years, and the rather, because
it may lead us to the Grounds of Architecture and by what Steps
this Humour of Colonades came into Practice in all Ages.”
But for all his contempt of the pedantry of rules of proportion, which the
greatest architects of antiquity did not observe unless it suited them, he saw
in the Orders themselves something eternal:
“Architecture aims at Eternity; and therefore the only thing
uncapable of Modes and Fashions in its Principals, the Orders.
The Orders are not only Roman and Greek, but Phœnician,
Hebrew, and Assyrian, being founded upon the Experience of all
Ages, promoted by the vast Treasures of all the great Monarchs,
and skill of the greatest Artists and Geometricians, every one
emulating each other.”
Wren rises to his greatest height in the opening of his first Tract, and shows
that if his life had fallen out otherwise, he might have left a reputation as a
writer:
“Architecture has its political Use; Public Buildings being the
Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People
and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country,
which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a
Commonwealth. The Emulation of the Cities of Greece was the
true Cause of their Greatness. The obstinate Valour of the Jews,
occasioned by the Love of their Temple, was a Cement that held
together that People, for many Ages, through infinite Changes.”
I have quoted at what may seem to be inordinate length, but Wren is
justified alike by the content of his thought and the aptness of his phrase,
and I am concerned rather to reveal the man than my idea of him.

In all Wren’s writings he shows an acute perception of the fact that
architecture has had an immensely long evolution. He had, of course, no
suspicion as to how far back its origins were to be sought, but clearly he
was approaching the idea that forms, once constructive, pass into decoration
and become part of the language of architecture. This is the final and, as I
believe, the effective reply to the puritan theorist, who cries aloud for the
discarding of traditional features in art. Sir Joshua Reynolds warned his
students that the business of a painter is to paint a fine picture, and that he is
not to be cheated of his materials by specious arguments. Wren was clear-
sighted enough to see that the Orders have a definite beauty value: his only
trouble was that he was not fully equipped to bend them wholly to his will.
The western front of St. Paul’s may be taken as an instance. As a Whole it is
a magnificent composition, and a source of inspiration to everyone with any
feeling for architecture, but can it be pretended that the segmental vault of
the upper portico does not belie the entablature and pediment in front of it?
Wren could cut away architrave and frieze inside for the benefit of his great
arches, and refer his critics to the Temple of Peace (now the Basilica of
Maxentius) at Rome for his authority, but he lacked the insight or the
courage to deal with the external problem in the same fashion. The fact is
that the great architect of any age is both leader and led, and cannot wholly
escape the limitations of his time. But there are valid compensations. His
work could not be justly representative of the age, one of the significant
values of architecture, if he could entirely dissociate himself from his age.
When it is remembered that Sir William Chambers can actually say in his
Civil Architecture (1759) that every time he passes St. Paul’s he regrets that
the pilasters have no entasis—probably few know it—we can form an idea
of the limitations of thought that Wren would have to encounter. Vitruvius,
[F]
with all his imperfections, was still enthroned, and few, if any, had yet
divined the real relation of that retired military engineer to the arts of
Greece and Rome. Wren had the true spirit of Bacon, and, with further
travel, might have seen further through the idols of his market-place.
He seems to have realised the trouble in which he had involved himself in
the arches of the octagon that supports his mighty dome. Every architectural
student since his day has sat and speculated as to what the solution might
have or should have been. Wren left a sufficiently feeble suggestion of
curtains and seated apostles, occupying the tribunes (three in each
presumably), as a means of veiling the defect. But the difficulty goes deeper

than that: the octagon is peculiarly troublesome to handle in terms of the
Orders, as a number of failures exist to show.
Wren’s work was always improving. The last, and westernmost, bay of St.
Paul’s inside shows more breadth and grandeur, but the carving of the
spandrels is so strange that one wonders if it can really be original. This
brings us to a characteristic of Wren which probably accounts for some of
his lapses of taste. It seems likely that he was not hard-hearted enough with
the people who worked under him, that he was too generous, too ready to
accept things on his assistants’ and craftsmen’s assurance that they were the
best that could be produced. He may thus have been led into an occasional
acquiescence, both in design and construction, in things which he must have
well known were not really right. Confronted with every sort of difficulty,
and none too well backed, he must have been desperately anxious to avoid
delays. His very ingenuity, moreover, would lead him to make the most of
what was available. Unfortunately in works of eternity—architecture aims
at eternity—such compromises meet with a stern Nemesis.
In the two centuries that have elapsed since his death Wren has been
admired and followed from very different points of view. It has been justly
said that he has been in fashion and out of fashion and is now above
fashion. Any doubt as to the reality and massive quality of his genius can
easily be dissipated by a consideration of what imitators have done. No
domed church on the lines of St. Paul’s has achieved equal beauty and
grandeur, nor have any of the innumerable steeples, based on his inventions,
been of the same rank. In domestic buildings, his special character remains
pre-eminent and informs the best work of to-day—a certain graciousness
that in others degenerated often into heaviness. There is a vast gap between
Wren at Hampton Court and Talman at Chatsworth.
Thus it is that in this Bicentenary Year there is the same feeling that caused
Sir John Vanbrugh to refuse the succession to his office “out of tenderness
for Sir Christopher Wren,” and that led the Spectator to publish a noble
tribute repudiating the ingratitude of his dismissal. The lovers of
architecture everywhere will feel that in honouring Wren they have
honoured the Art to which a man of such amazing gifts and nobility of
character was content to devote the flower of his life.

Sir Christopher Wren was the very fulfilment of Wotton’s prophecy
—“Architecture can want no commendation, where there are Noble Men or
Noble mindes.”

APPENDIX I
A NOTE IN AMPLIFICATION OF THE
REFERENCE IN CHAPTER IV. TO PASCAL’S
PROBLEM
Mathematicians who wished to answer Pascal’s challenge were given until
October 1, 1658, for a solution, and an umpire, M. de Cavarci, was
nominated, and the prizes were 40 doubloons or pistoles and for the second,
20. In a letter of October 10 Pascal says he has received both attempts at
solutions of the problems set and also a number of discussions of matters
connected with the cycloid which did not pretend to be solutions of his
problem:
“Mais entre tous les écrits qu’on a recues de cette sorte, il n’y a rien de plus
beau que ce qui a été envoyé par M. Wren; car outre la belle manière qu’il
donne de mesurer le plan de la roulette (=cycloid), il a donné la
comparaison de la ligne courbe même et ses parties, avec la ligne droit: sa
proposition est que la ligne de la roulette est quadruple de son axe, dont il a
envoyé l’énonciation sans démonstration. Et comme il est le premier qui l’a
produite, c’est sans doute a lui que l’honneur de la première invention en
appartient.”
Summing up his history of the cycloid, he concluded that the first to remark
that curve in nature was P. Mersenne, that M. de Roberval first worked out
some of its properties, “que le premier qui en a mesuré la ligne courbe a été
M. Wren.”
The story is then taken up by a letter of Cavarci (dated December 10, 1658),
the umpire, to Pascal (now masquerading under a new pseudonym—A.
Dettonville = an anagram of Louis de Montalte), in which he recites the
nature of the problems set—i.e., to find the dimensions and centres of
gravity of the solids generated by the revolution of the cycloid. He goes on
to say that there were sent solutions of the more easy problems—“savoir: le
centre de gravité de la ligne courbe et la dimension des solides, lequelle M.

Wren nous envoya dans ses lettres du 12 Octobre”—but concludes that of
the challenge problem no solutions had been sent.
Pascal replied to this letter with a series of letters setting out a general
method for dealing with such problems and the actual solutions of the
problems he had proposed.
The real quarrel as to whether the problems had been solved or not was
with Wallis and not with Wren. Wallis appears to have sent a solution and
followed it up by various letters offering corrections. However, he was
adjudged wrong in principle (see Récit de l’Examen pour les prix sur la
Roulette). The prizes were not awarded. Wallis afterwards (1659) published
a “Tractatus de Cycloide,” in which are included four propositions on the
cycloid which Wren had given to Wallis.
Turning now to Wren’s counter problem. It is not directly connected with
the cycloid, but with one of the properties of the ellipse, and it had
previously been suggested by Kepler. It appears to have been confused with
Pascal’s cycloid problems because Pascal showed in his general method
that various cycloid problems could be referred to the ellipse. Pascal has a
chapter, “L’égalité entre les lignes courbes de toutes sortes de Roulettes et
les lignes elliptiques,” in the course of which he remarks, “Cette admirable
égalité de la courbe de la roulette simple à une droite [=straight line] que M.
Wren a trouvée, n’était, pour aussi dire, q’une égalité par accident, qui vient
de ce qu’en ce cas l’ellipse se trouvé réduite à une droite.” Wren’s challenge
seems to have remained unnoticed.

APPENDIX II
AN ATTEMPT AT A WREN CHRONOLOGY
The dates of Wren’s work have been set down so wildly that I prefer the
omission of some buildings to the repetition of blunders. Even so I have no
doubt repeated many old mistakes and made some fresh ones. An accurate
chronology of Wren would be of great comfort to the student. I have
checked only forty-seven of Miss Milman’s dates, but found forty-five of
them wrong, by from one to twenty-five years.
The City churches are given under the year during which the first payment
to the builders was made: the dates in brackets mark the last of such
payments, which may well have been some years after the buildings were
completed. Wren seems to have settled final accounts in batches.
L. W.
1632. Birth of Sir Christopher Wren, October 20.
1642. Entered Westminster School.
1647. Invention of weather-clock.
1649. Entered Wadham College.
1651. B.A.
1653. M.A. and Fellow of All Souls.
1654. Meets John Evelyn at Oxford.
1657. Appointed Gresham Professor of Astronomy.
1658. Attempt to solve Pascal’s problem.
1660. Royal Society founded in Wren’s room at Gresham
College.
1661. Appointed Savilian Professor of Astronomy.
D.C.L., Oxford and Cambridge.
Appointed Assistant to Sir John Denham, Surveyor-
General.
1662. Offer of Tangier surveyorship refused.
Appointed to survey old St. Paul’s.
1663. Doorway, Ely Cathedral.
Pembroke Chapel, Cambridge, begun.

Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford.
1665. Trinity College, Oxford: new court.
Visit to Paris (July).
1666. Return from Paris (March).
Report on old St. Paul’s (May), and First Design for dome
over crossing.
The Great Fire (September).
Prepared new Plan of London.
Appointed Surveyor-General and Principal Architect for
repairing St. Paul’s, the City churches, and other public
buildings.
1668. Emmanuel Chapel, Cambridge (1677).
Repairs to Salisbury Cathedral Spire.
1669. First Marriage: to Faith Coghill, December 7.
Appointed Surveyor-General of the King’s Works.
1670. St. Olave’s, Jewry (1679).
St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East (1671).
St. Michael’s Wood Street (1687).
St. Mary Aldermanbury (1686).
St. Mary-at-Hill (1676).
St. Christopher’s (1675).
St. Vedast Fosters (1673).
St. Sepulchre’s (1677).
St. Mary Woolnoth (1677): the pre-Hawksmoor church.
St. Mildred Poultry (1679).
St. Benet Fink (1681).
St. Mary-le-Bow (1680).
St. Lawrence Jewry (1686).
St. Bride’s (1684).
St. Dionis Backchurch (1686).
St. Michael’s Cornhill (1677).
St. Edmund the King (1679).
St. Sepulchre’s (1677).
“Rejected Design” for St. Paul’s.
Temple Bar.
1671. St. Nicholas Cole Abbey (1681).
St. George Botolph (1679).

St. Mary-le-Bow Steeple (1683).
St. Magnus (1687).
The Monument.
Wren meets Grinling Gibbons.
1672. St. Stephen’s Walbrook (1687).
Wren knighted (or possibly 1674).
1673. St. Paul’s: “Model Design” approved by King (afterwards
rejected).
Trinity College Library, Cambridge.
1674. St. Bartholomew Exchange (1686).
St. Stephen’s Coleman Street (1681);
St. James Garlickhithe (1687).
Honywood Library, Lincoln Cathedral.
1675. St. Paul’s: “Warrant Design” approved by King and first
stone laid.
Birth of son Christopher. Death of first wife.
Greenwich Observatory.
1676. St. Anne and St. Agnes (1687).
St. Michael’s Queenhithe (1687).
St. Michael Bassishaw (1682).
1677. Christ Church (1691).
St. Peter’s Cornhill (1687).
St. Benet Paul’s Wharf (1685).
St. Martin’s Ludgate (1687).
All Hallows the Great (1687).
St. Swithin’s (1687).
All Hallows Bread Street (1687).
Second marriage: to Jane Fitzwilliam, February 24.
Birth of daughter Jane, November.
1678. St. Antholin’s (1691).
Design of Charles I.’s tomb.
1679. Kilmainham Hospital, Dublin.
Birth of son William.
1680. St. Austin’s (1687).
Death of second wife, October.
St. Clement Danes.
1681. St. Mildred Bread Street (1687).

St. Benet’s Gracechurch (1687).
St. Mary Abchurch (1687).
St. Matthew’s Friday Street (1687).
Tom Tower, Christ Church, Oxford.
Sworn in as President of the Royal Society, January 12.
1682. St. Alban’s Wood Street (1687).
Chelsea Hospital begun.
Latin School, Christ’s Hospital.
1683. St. James Piccadilly.
St. Mary Magdalen Old Fish Street (1687).
St. Clement’s Eastcheap (1687).
Palace at Winchester begun but not completed.
1684. St. Margaret Pattens (1689).
St. Michael’s Crooked Lane (1694).
Appointed Controller of Works, Windsor Castle.
Middle Temple Gateway.
Repairs to Chichester Cathedral Spire.
1685. St. Andrew’s Wardrobe (1695).
1686. St. Margaret’s Lothbury (1693).
St. Mary Somerset (1694).
All Hallows Lombard Street (1694).
St. Michael’s Royal (1694).
1688. Town Hall, Windsor.
1689. M.P. for Windsor.
1690. Hampton Court begun.
1690. Kensington Palace.
1691. Chapel, Trinity College, Oxford.
1693. Library, Queen’s College, Oxford.
1694. Chapel, Trinity College, Oxford.
1695. Greenwich Hospital begun.
Morden College, Blackheath.
1697. St. Paul’s: Choir opened for service, December 2.
1698. Marlborough House, London.
North Transept front, Westminster Abbey.
1700. M.P. for Weymouth.
1703. Death of daughter Jane.
1704. Orangery, Kensington Palace.

1710. St. Paul’s: top-stone of Lantern laid.
1711. St. Paul’s: nominal completion.
1717. St. Paul’s: Wren’s complaint to Commissioners against the
Balustrade.
1718. Dismissed from Surveyorship.
1723. Death of Wren, February 25.

APPENDIX III
A NOTE ON SOME PORTRAITS OF WREN
The following brief particulars of several portraits of Wren, some of which
are reproduced in the preceding pages, may lead to more precise
information being disinterred:
(a) Wren as a Man of Forty (Plate II.).—When I saw this, it was
in the possession of the late Mrs. Catherine Pigott. It is now, I
believe, in the possession of the Bishop of Southwell, to whom
it passed on Mrs. Pigott’s death. It is unsigned, and there is no
record as to its authorship. It shows Wren as a young man, and I
had thought it represented him while in the twenties. Mr.
Richard W. Goulding, F.S.A., dates the cravat about 1675, which
would make Wren forty-three. The modelling of the face is not
unlike that of the Pearce bust, which tends to confirm the age as
about forty.
(b) The Wadham College Portrait (Plate XIII.).—This is in itself
a poor piece of painting, and has a vague history. It is an 1825
copy by John Smith, of Oxford, deriving ultimately, it is said,
from a Kneller portrait at Lambeth Palace, which, I am
informed, has disappeared. It seems rather to be based on the
Sheldonian portrait, which was attributed by Dallaway to
Thornhill, “painted in conjunction with Verrio and Kneller.” I
give the unlikely story of its authorship as it is told, adding only
that as the plan in Wren’s hand shows the St. Paul’s of the
Warrant Design or later, it must be after 1675, and therefore
Wren is depicted as a man of forty-three or more, probably a
good deal more, for he is markedly older than in the last
mentioned.
(c) Bust by Edward Pearce at the Ashmolean (Plate V.).—This
beautiful work has been dated 1673, by a letter written by
Christopher, the architect’s son, and quoted by Mr. Lionel Cust.
It may well be Wren as a man of forty-one, and the younger

Christopher’s date can be accepted, but he was very casual in his
chronologies.
(d) The Royal Society Portrait.—The legend on the frame says
this picture is by Michael Wright, but Mr. Collins Baker
attributes it, on the ground of style, to Riley and Closterman in
collaboration. He claims that it is the basis of the Kirkall
engraving (see next note). If so, Kirkall turned the face the other
way. The view of St. Paul’s shows a transitional design between
the Warrant Design with its nightmare steeple and the dome as
built. The clock towers are almost exactly like the intermediate
design preserved at All Souls. I suggest it shows a man of
seventy.
(e) The Kirkall Engraving after Closterman (Plate XV.).—This
rare portrait was given to me by Mrs. Pigott shortly before her
death, and apart from its having been, as she told me, an
heirloom in the Wren family, it has an interest as showing Elisha
Kirkall’s “chiaroscuro” style of engraving interpreting
Closterman’s portrait.
(f) The St. Paul’s Deanery Portrait (Plate XIV.).—This is a copy
of the best known portrait of all, the Kneller at the National
Portrait Gallery, and an inferior copy, for it reveals a man of far
less distinction, both in character and feature, than the National
portrait. The latter is attributed to the year 1711, and is therefore
of Wren when he was nearly eighty.
(g) The Welbeck Portrait (Plate IV.).—The picture is a small
whole length on panel. The architect wears a red dressing-gown
with white lining, white stockings, and red shoes; his right hand
is placed on his hip, and in his left hand he holds a drawing of
the elevation of the façade of St. Paul’s. On the left side of the
picture there is a lurid sky indicative of the burning of the City;
in the right-hand top corner is a bust of Charles II., flanked by
an amorino weighing the insignia of royalty (crown, sceptre,
etc.), against four shields of arms (England, France, Scotland,
and Ireland), and round the waist of the amorino is a scroll
lettered “Justum est.”

This picture was acquired by the fifth Duke of Portland in 1861.
It was then attributed to H. Gascar, who is stated to have been in
England circa 1674-80, and who might consequently have
painted Sir Christopher soon after he made his design for the
new Cathedral. The West Front is shown in the picture with the
single Order, an early stage of the design. The architect looks
very young for a man of about forty-two years of age, but in the
case of painted portraits it is often difficult to reconcile the
actual age of a sitter with his apparent age.
(h) The Queen’s College Bust.—This posthumous portrait has
been attributed to Rysbrack; it is certainly worthy of him. Wren
is shown as a very old man.
(k) The Medal at Wadham College (Plate XVI.).—As it is
commonly said that this medal was struck to celebrate the
completion of St. Paul’s, it is a little unkind to have to set down
the fact that it was cast and chased (not struck) by G. D. Gaale, a
German, about the year 1783, when he exhibited it in London,
sixty years after Wren’s death in 1723.
(l) Art Union of London Medal.—A medal was issued in 1846:
obverse, with bust of Wren, signed H. Wilson, Sc.; reverse, St.
Paul’s, signed B. Wyon.
I hope the above notes may lead people better informed than myself to
bring out facts which will enable a full and correct catalogue of Wren
portraits to be prepared. Their publication in the Bicentenary issue of
Architecture brought Mr. Richard W. Goulding to my aid in correcting some
mistakes I then made, and he has added the facts about the Welbeck portrait.
A list of engravings after the Kneller portrait is given in Mr. F.
O’Donoghue’s “Catalogue of Engraved English Portraits in the British
Museum.”

INDEX
Abbey, Westminster, Wren and, 137, 138, 139

Aims of architecture, Wren on the, 153

All Hallows, Lombard Street, Church of, 81

Armoury and Mint at the Tower of London, 107

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 110

Association between architecture and military engineering, 13

Astronomy, Wren as a Professor of, 19, 36

Bacon, influence on Wren of, 30, 31

Barometer:
Torricelli’s work on the, 36
Wren’s work on the, 36

Belton House, 105

Benson, William, Surveyor-General, 74

Bernini:
Lay-out in front of St. Peter’s, Rome, 53, 108;
meeting with Wren, 48, 49;
referred to, 108

Bird, Robert, coppersmith, 120

Birth of Sir Christopher Wren, 1

Building materials, Wren’s views on, 93, 94

Busby, Dr., of Westminster School, 4, 10, 11

Cambridge:
Pembroke College Chapel, 109
Trinity College Library, 46, 47, 109, 110, 125

Campbell, Colin, work at Greenwich Hospital by, 103

Carlyle, Thomas, on the City churches, 97, 98;
on Chelsea Hospital, 97

Cathedrals:
Lincoln, Honywood Chapel at, 110
St. Paul’s, London. See St. Paul’s Cathedral
Salisbury, 137

Chapels:
Pembroke College, Cambridge, 46, 109
Trinity College, Oxford, 110
Wadham College, Oxford, 16, 17

Charles I., design for the tomb of, 107, 108;
pedestal for statue of, Charing Cross, 104

Chelsea Hospital, 97, 98, 99, 108, 125

Childhood of Wren, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Christ Church:
Newgate Street, 90
Oxford, College, 111

Christ’s Hospital, London, 107, 130

Chronology, an attempt at a Wren, 160

Church:
St. Andrew, Holborn, 87
St. Clement Danes, Strand, 78, 125
St. James, Piccadilly, 78, 90, 94, 95
St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, 21, 22
Temple Church, 21

Churches, City:
Christ Church, Newgate Street, 90
St. Alban, Wood Street, 80, 81
St. Andrew-in-the-Wardrobe, 90
St. Anne and St. Agnes, 81
St. Antholin, Watling Street, 90
St. Augustine, Watling Street, 55, 86, 119, 126
St. Benet, Paul’s Wharf, 86, 119
St. Benet Fink, 90
St. Bride, Fleet Street, 87, 88, 90, 92
St. Clement, Eastcheap, 81
St. Dunstan-in-the-East, 78, 81, 82, 136
St. Lawrence Jewry, 86, 89
St. Magnus, London Bridge, 81, 85
St. Margaret, Lothbury, 86
St. Margaret’s Pattens, Rood Lane, 84, 85, 86
St. Martin, Ludgate, 56, 85
St. Mary Abchurch, 90
St. Mary, Aldermanbury, 81
St. Mary Aldermary, 76, 136
St. Mary-at-Hill, 81
St. Mary-le-Bow Cheapside, 87, 88, 145, 146
St. Mary Somerset, 78
St. Mary Woolnoth (by Hawksmoor), 79
St. Michael, Cornhill, 136
St. Michael Paternoster Royal, 81

St. Mildred, Bread Street, 86, 90, 91, 120
St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, 80
St. Sepulchre, 78
St. Stephen, Coleman Street, 81
St. Stephen, Walbrook, 81, 88, 89, 119
St. Swithin, Cannon Street, 84, 90
St. Vedast, Foster Lane, 79, 80

City Churches, referred to, 97, 98, 119, 120, 124, 126, 136, 145,
146, 160

Coghill, Faith, Wren’s first wife, 20, 21

College:
All Souls, Oxford, 11, 12
Christ Church, Oxford, 111
Emmanuel, Cambridge, 110
Morden, Blackheath, 108, 109
Pembroke, Cambridge, 46, 109
of Physicians, Warwick Lane, 107
Queen’s, Oxford, 110
Trinity, Cambridge, 46, 47, 109, 110, 125
Wadham, Oxford, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16

Cox, Mary, mother of Wren, 2

Custom House, London, 107

De l’Orme, Philibert, referred to, 50

Denham, Sir John, Surveyor-General, 43, 101

“Dome of London, The,” 59

Draughtsman, Wren as a, 129, 130

East Knoyle Rectory, Wilts, Wren’s birthplace, 1

Emmanuel College, Cambridge, chapel and cloister at, 110

Etching on glass, Wren’s experiments in, 40

Evelyn, John, 15, 24, 25, 43, 53, 60, 62, 98, 102, 112, 113, 114,
115, 137

Family life of Sir Christopher Wren, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24,
25, 26, 27

Fitzwilliam, Jane, Wren’s second wife, 21, 22

Fitzwilliam of Lifford, Lord, father of Wren’s second wife, 21

France, Wren’s travels in, 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51

Gibbons, Grinling, 71, 104, 106, 107, 108, 114, 115

Gothic Architecture, Wren and, 138, 139

Greenwich Hospital, 83, 101, 102, 103, 125

Groombridge Place, Kent, 106

Hampton Court Palace, 99, 100, 101, 121, 156

Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 79, 103, 104, 110, 126, 149

Holder, Dr. William, a tutor and brother-in-law of Wren, 3, 20

Honywood Library and Cloister, Lincoln Cathedral, 110

Hooke, Robert, 4, 8

Hospital:
Chelsea, 97, 98, 99, 108, 125
Christ’s, London, 107, 130
Greenwich, 101, 102, 103, 125
Kilmainham, Dublin, 108

Houses by, or attributed to, Wren:
Belton, 105;
Groombridge Place, Kent, 106;
Hampton Court Palace, 99, 100, 101, 121, 156;
Kensington Palace, 105;
Marlborough
House, London, 106;
Pallant House, Chichester, 106;
Winchester Palace, 107;
Wren’s House, Chichester, 106

Inventions of Wren, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

Jennings, Richard, master-carpenter, 71

Jones, Inigo, referred to, 13, 43, 51, 52, 53, 70, 101, 106, 144,
145, 146, 147

Kempster, Christopher, 119

Kensington Palace, 105

Kent, William, and Kensington Palace, 105

Kilmainham, Dublin, Royal Hospital at, 108

Knighting of Wren, 121

Lansdowne Chronology, MS. by Christopher Wren junior, 9

Letter of Wren to his son, 22, 23, 24

Library:
Honywood, Lincoln Cathedral, 110
Trinity College, Cambridge, 109, 110, 125

Love-letter from Wren to Faith Coghill, 20, 21

Marlborough House, London, 106

Mathematics, Wren’s study of, 4, 31

Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, Wren’s conjectural restoration of
the, 132, 133, 134

Middleton, Constance, wife of Christopher Wren junior, 25

Mint, the, in the Tower of London, 107

Monument, the, London, 34, 104

Morden College, Blackheath, 108, 109

Morris, William, and the City churches, 97, 98

Museum, Ashmolean, Oxford, 110

“News from the Dead,” pamphlet by Wren, referred to, 16

Oughtred, Mr., Wren’s letter to, 7

Oxford:
Ashmolean Museum, 110
Christ Church College, 111
Incident at, 16
Queen’s College, 110
Sheldonian Theatre, 45, 46
Trinity College Chapel at, 110
Wren’s education at, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

Palace:
Hampton Court, 99, 100, 101, 121, 156
Kensington, 105
Winchester, 107

Palladio’s influence on Wren, 52

Pallant House, Chichester, 106

Parentage and pedigree of Wren, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Parentalia, the, 1, 3, 5, 8, 9, 13, 15, 22, 24, 26, 34, 41, 65, 109,
124, 125, 132, 149

Paris, Wren’s journey to, referred to, 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51

Parliament, Wren as a member of, 120, 121

Pascal’s problem and Wren’s solution of it, 34, 35, 36, 158, 159

Pedestal of the Charles I. statue, Charing Cross, 104

Pembroke College Chapel, Cambridge, 46, 109

Pepys, Samuel, 14, 114, 130

Physicians, College of, Warwick Lane, 107

Pigott, Mrs. Corbett, 26

Plan for rebuilding London after the Great Fire, Wren’s, 53, 54,
55, 56, 57, 58

Portraits of Sir Christopher Wren, some, 164, 165, 166

Pulpits and pews, Wren’s views on, 95

Queen’s College, Oxford, 110

Ripley, Thomas, and Greenwich Hospital, 103

Royal Society, Wren and the, 12, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42

Ruskin, John, and Renaissance Architecture, 137

Ryland’s pedigree of the Wren family, 18

St. Alban, Wood Street, 81

St. Andrew, Holborn, 78

St. Andrew-in-the-Wardrobe, 90

St. Anne and St. Agnes, 81

St. Antholin, Watling Street, 90

St. Augustine, Watling Street, 55, 86, 119, 126

St. Benet, Paul’s Wharf, 86, 119

St. Benet Fink, 90

St. Bride, Fleet Street, 87, 87, 88, 90, 92

St. Clement Danes, Strand, 78, 125

St. Clement, Eastcheap, 81

St. Dunstan-in-the-East, 78, 81, 82, 136

St. James, Piccadilly, 78, 90, 94, 95

St. Lawrence Jewry, 86, 89

St. Magnus, London Bridge, 81, 85

St. Margaret, Lothbury, 86

St. Margaret Pattens, Rood Lane, 84, 85, 86

St. Martin, Ludgate, 56, 85

St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, 21, 22

St. Mary Abchurch, 90

St. Mary, Aldermanbury, 81

St. Mary Aldermary, 78, 136

St. Mary-at-Hill, 81

St. Mary-le-Bow Cheapside, 87, 88, 145

St. Mary Somerset, 78

St. Mary Woolnoth, 79

St. Michael, Cornhill, 136

St. Michael Paternoster Royal, 81

St. Mildred, Bread Street, 86, 90, 91, 120

St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, 80

St. Paul’s: Old, Wren’s plans for the restoration of, 56, 59, 60,
61;
Cathedral, London, balustrade on the upper cornice of, 74;
cost of, 73;
dome of, 55, 56, 59, 71, 103;
first design for, 63;
mean treatment of Wren over, 73, 74;
opening of, 73;
“rejected” or “model” second design for, 63, 64, 64, 65, 66,
66;
South Staircase of, referred to, 34;
third or “warrant” design for, 67, 68;
Wren’s achievement in, 76, 77;
reference to, 83, 116, 121, 122, 126, 143, 145, 147, 148, 154,
155, 156

St. Peter’s, Rome, 53

St. Sepulchre, 78

St. Stephen, Coleman Street, 81

St. Stephen, Walbrook, 81, 88, 89, 119

St. Swithin, Cannon Street, 84, 90

St. Vedast, Foster Lane, 79, 80

Salisbury Cathedral, 137

Scarborough, Sir Charles, a tutor of Wren, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10

Shaw, Norman, and Hampton Court Palace, 100

Shepheard, Rev. William, a tutor of Wren, 3

Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, 45, 46

Soane Museum, Wren relics at, 121
Sir John, 99

Sons of Sir Christopher Wren, 25

Spires, City church, by Wren, 84

Strong, Edward, master-mason, 22, 23, 24, 69, 71, 73, 119, 120

Talman, William, architect, 101, 156

Temple Bar, 104, 105

Temple Church, 21

Thermometer designed by Wren, 8

Thornhill, Sir James, paintings in St. Paul’s by, 74

Tijou, Jean, metal-worker, 71, 101, 120, 121

Tomb, Wren’s design for a, 108

Tom Tower, the, Oxford, 111

Torricelli, his work on the barometer, 36

Tower of London, 107

Town-planning, Wren and, 53

Trinity College, Cambridge, Library of, 46, 47, 109, 110, 125

Trinity College, Oxford, Chapel at, 110

University degrees, Wren’s, 11, 12

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 103, 106, 110, 149, 157

Ward, Dr. Seth, 9

Webb, John, 43, 101, 106

Wilkins, John, Warden of Wadham, 9, 12, 13

Winchester Palace, 107

Wotton, Sir Henry, 139, 140, 141, 142, 157

Wren, Sir Christopher:
Family and relations:
Father, 1;
mother, 2;
sisters, 18;
grandfather, 1;
great-grandfather, 1;
sons, 21, 22, 23;

daughter, 13;
brother-in-law, 2;
uncle, 2, 18;
cousin, 18
Education and Studies:
Studies at home, 3;
at Westminster School, 4;
under Sir Charles Scarborough, 5;
Assistant at the Surgeon’s Hall, 7;
at Oxford, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17;
matriculation of, 11;
University degrees of, 11, 12;
Fellowship of All Souls, 16
Personal:
Critical mind, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142;
death, 122;
epitaph of, 75;
health of, 4, 10, 18;
heirlooms at Soane Museum, 121;
Kirkall engraved portrait, 26;
legible penmanship, 4;
letter to his son, Christopher, 22, 23, 24;
letter in Latin to his father, 5;
love-letter to Faith Coghill, 20;
marriage, first, to Faith Coghill, 21;
marriage, second, to Jane Fitzwilliam, 21;
patience of, 8;
poetic gift of, 16;
portraits of, 164, 165, 166;
retirement, 75;
social relaxations, 114, 115, 116;
theories of beauty, 150, 151;
will, 25, 26, 27
Scientific Studies and Achievements:
As an astronomer, 32, 33, 34, 37;
as a classical archæologist, 132, 133, 134;
as a student and scholar, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138,

139, 140, 141, 142, 143;
essays, 15;
experiments in etching on glass, 40;
experiments in natural science, 38, 39, 40, 41;
inventions of, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17;
part in the development of natural science, 28, 29;
place as a mathematician, 34, 35, 36;
scientific labors of 116, 117, 118;
solution of Pascal’s problem, 34, 35, 36, 158, 159;
transactions with the Royal Society, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42
Professional and Public:
“Architect of Adventure, The,” 144, 145, 146, 147, 148,
149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157;
as a Member of Parliament, 120, 121;
as a professional man, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129,
130, 131;
influence of Inigo Jones, 51, 52;
influence of Palladio, 52;
introduction to Bernini, 48;
knighting of, 121;
plan for rebuilding London, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58;
remuneration and fees, 124, 125;
Surveyor-General of His Majesty’s Works, 43, 124, 125,
127, 128, 129;
travels in France, 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51

Wren, Dean Christopher (father), 1, 2, 3, 20, 142

Wren, Christopher (second son) 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 119,
125
Constance (daughter-in-law), 25
Cuthbert (great-grandfather), 1
Faith (mother), 2, 18
Francis (grandfather), 1
Gilbert (eldest son, died in infancy), 21
Jane (daughter), 13, 21, 22
Margaret (great-granddaughter), 26

Matthew, Bishop of Ely (uncle), 2, 18
Matthew (cousin), 18
Stephen (grandson), 26
William (great-great-grandfather), 1
William (third son), 22, 24, 25, 27

Wren chronology, an attempt at a, 160

Wren’s House, Chichester, 106
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., GUILDFORD AND ESHER

FOOTNOTES:
[A] English Leadwork: Its Art and History, chapter vi.
[B] “The Complete Building Accounts of the City Churches
(Parochial) designed by Sir Christopher Wren,” Archæologia, vol. lxvi.
[C] A History of Renaissance Architecture in England.
[D] I dealt with this subject in detail some years ago in the
Architectural Review.
[E] In Form in Civilization (Oxford University Press), 1922, a volume
to be read by everyone, for it contains the ripe judgment on many
matters of a very stimulating critic of the part played by architecture in
thought and life.
[F] In Wren’s petty cash accounts is the entry: “For a booke on
Vitruvius for the use of ye office—£3.”

The “Country Life” Library

ENGLISH HOMES
By H. AVRAY TIPPING, M.A., F.S.A.
A Monumental Work on the Country Homes of
England, divided into the following distinctive
Chronological and Dynastic Periods:
NORMAN AND 1066-1485 (Now
I. PLANTAGENET Ready)
1485-1558 (Ready
EARLY TUDOR
II. Autumn, 1923)
LATE TUDOR AND 1558-1649 (Now
III. EARLY STUART Ready)
1649-1714 (Now
LATE STUART
IV. Ready)
1714-1760 (Now
EARLY GEORGIAN
V. Ready)
1760-1820 (In
LATE GEORGIAN
VI. Preparation)
It is the aim of this great work to be for English Domestic
Architecture and Life what the “Dictionary of National
Biography” and the “New English Dictionary” are for our other
heritages of History and Language. That it may worthily take the
place which is its undoubted due beside these works in every
Reference Library, private or public, no effort has been spared in
dealing with the splendid subject.

In the six volumes here announced is systematically and
sympathetically set forth in all its fascinating fullness that
building up of homes and home life which has been so closely
influenced by, and has in its turn so strongly impressed, the
minds and ideas of the generations who have made our England.
EACH VOLUME CONTAINS
FROM 400 to 500 SUPERB ILLUSTRATIONS AND PLANS
Price Three Guineas net each
Published at the offices of “COUNTRY LIFE”

THE ARCHITECTURE OF
ROBERT AND JAMES ADAM
(1758-1794)
By ARTHUR T. BOLTON, F.S.A., F.R.I.B.A.
In two large folio volumes, containing about 700 splendid
illustrations, plans,
and drawings. Full gilt edges. £8 8s. net; by post £8 10s.
This important work forms a complete survey of the
Architecture, Decoration, and Furniture of the famous Adelphi
Brethren, and constitutes a monumental record of the Adam
style. Although during the Greek and Gothic Revivals Adam
architecture was freely destroyed, there still remains, as these
volumes prove, a marvelous wealth of work, much of which is
complete with the actual Furniture, Carpets, and Hangings made
to his designs. No country in the world can show equivalent
instances of such historical preservation as are illustrated in
these magnificent volumes.

TWENTY-FIVE
GREAT HOUSES OF FRANCE
By SIR THEODORE ANDREA COOK, M.A., F.S.A.
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER OUTLINING THE
DEVELOPMENT OF FRENCH DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE
BY W. H. WARD, M.A., F.R.I.B.A.

Illustrations by Frederick H. Evans.
Large folio, containing over 400 superb illustrations, plans and
diagrams, with a map of France showing the position of each
Chateau. Half-bound in buckram, £2 12s. 6d. net; in half
morocco, £3 2s. 6d. net; postage 1s. extra.
In this volume Sir Theodore Cook presents a pageant of the
great figures who surrounded the throne of such kings as
François Premier and Louis Quatorze. Louis of Orleans at
Pierrefonds, the Duke of Guise at Blois, Fouquet at Vaux le
Vicomte and Condé at Chantilly—these are typical of the story
that the author unfolds, with a grasp so sure that the men and
women live again, while their great houses are depicted with a
wealth of illustration never before achieved or attempted.

GARDEN ORNAMENT
By GERTRUDE JEKYLL.
Large folio, with over 600 matchless Illustrations and charming
coloured frontispiece, £3 3s. net; by post, £3 4s. In half-levant
grain, £3 15s. net; by post, £3 16s.
Examples are furnished, from the finest gardens in the country,
of beautiful Balustrading; graceful Gates, Urns, Vases and
Sculptured Ornaments; Stone paved Courts, Paved Ways and
Garden Seats, Loggias, Orangeries, Garden Houses and
Dovecotes, Parterres, Sundials, Topiary Work, Pergolas and
Treillage, Canals, Ponds and Water Gardens, Bridges, Fountains
and Dipping Wells, Flower Borders, Wall Gardening and
Japanese Gardens.

THE
GARDENS OF ITALY
With Historical and Descriptive Notes by E. March Phillipps.
Edited and thoroughly revised, with copious additions and
reproductions of valuable old plans.
By ARTHUR T. BOLTON, F.S.A., F.R.I.B.A.
Large folio, containing over 400 Illustrations, in one volume, £3
3s. net; by post, £3 4s. In half-levant grain, £3 15s. net; by post,
£3 16s.
The Gardens illustrated are grouped by districts, beginning in
the South with Rome, followed by the neighbourhood of the
Eternal City—as Tivoli and Frascati, Bagnaia and Caprarola.
Proceeding northwards the reader comes to Florence, famous for
the Villas and Gardens in the neighbourhood of the City. Then
follows Venetia, with the celebrated Malcontenta, Stra and
Maser. The Lake District succeeds, with Balbianello and the
Borromenian Islands; and finally the inexhaustible regions of
Italian art at Genoa, renowned for superb examples of palatial
architecture and gardening art.
A complete Catalogue of books in the “Country Life” Library
will be sent post free on application to The Manager, “Country
Life,” Ltd., 20, Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, W.C. 2.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been
standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
Emboldened page numbers in the Index indicate
illustrations.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR
CHRISTOPHER WREN ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright royalties.
Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license,
apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and
trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not
be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of
the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project
Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may
use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative
works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks
may be modified and printed and given away—you may do practically
ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S.
copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license,
especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing
Project Gutenberg electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg electronic
work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept
all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg electronic works in your possession. If
you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg
electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this
agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom
you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people
who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the

collection of Project Gutenberg electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in
the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg mission of promoting free
access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg works
in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project
Gutenberg name associated with the work. You can easily comply with
the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format
with its attached full Project Gutenberg License when you share it
without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg work (any work on which
the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase
“Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed,
viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License included with

this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located
in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
country where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is derived
from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a
notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright
holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United
States without paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or
providing access to a work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg”
associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply either with
the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain
permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg License for all works posted
with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of
this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide
access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official

version posted on the official Project Gutenberg website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of
obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg electronic works provided
that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the
use of Project Gutenberg works calculated using the method you
already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to the
owner of the Project Gutenberg trademark, but he has agreed to donate
royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60 days
following each date on which you prepare (or are legally required to
prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly
marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information about
donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he does
not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™ License. You
must require such a user to return or destroy all copies of the works
possessed in a physical medium and discontinue all use of and all
access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™ works.

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.

• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set forth
in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of the
Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in
Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend
considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and
proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the
Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may be
stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete,
inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES -
Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in
paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation,
the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party
distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this
agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO
REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH
OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE
FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT,
CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES

EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you
discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it,
you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by
sending a written explanation to the person you received the work
from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must return
the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity that
provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a
replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work
electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to
give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu
of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a
refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If
any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law
of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the
Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability,
costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly
from any of the following which you do or cause to occur: (a)

distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg work, (b) alteration,
modification, or additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg work,
and (c) any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project
Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg’s goals
and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg collection will remain freely
available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure and
permanent future for Project Gutenberg and future generations. To
learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and
the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state
of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue
Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification number is
64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S.
federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 41 Watchung Plaza
#516, Montclair NJ 07042, USA, +1 (862) 621-9288. Email contact

links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation’s website and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small
donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax
exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States.
Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable
effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these
requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have
not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg
electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search facility:
www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg, including
how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.